Coupling Public Sector Information and Public-Funded Research Data in Europe: A Vision of an Open Data Ecosystem - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 281

The second example is the SmartOpenData* project, which investigates the
creation of a Linked Open Data infrastructure (including software tools and data)
fed by public and freely available data sources. SmartOpenData focuses particu-
larly on data for biodiversity and environment protection and research in European
protected areas and national parks. As the focus is on environmental data, the
project applies Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data in the context of the
INSPIRE Directive.
Finally, the Data Supply Chains for Pools, Services and Analytics in Economics
and Finance (DOPA) project † is an interesting example of opening financial and
economic data. The DOPA project aims to semantically link large amounts of eco-
nomic and financial data and make these publicly available as standardized data
sets for further data analysis and reuse. In this sense, the integration of distinct
platforms by linking contained data sets, either public environmental, economic, or
financial data, within each platform seems to be a promising way to make advances
toward the coupling of government and research data.
13.2.2 Research Data Initiatives
We now summarize a selection of the many already ongoing initiatives and research
projects for making public-funded research data publicly available, discoverable,
and accessible to the entire scientific community. Past studies in the literature
already highlighted the fact that most researchers would be willing to share their
research data and reuse others' research data for their own research projects, but
unfortunately, the majority do not know how to do so or simply do not follow the
required practices to share their output data and make these available to others in
a convenient way (Piwowar, 2011; Tenopir et al., 2011). Along the same lines, the
EC (2012a, 2012b) promotes multidisciplinary collaboration and the sharing of
scientific findings. In July 2013, the EC held a public consultation (EC, 2013c) on
open access to research data to get some insights for the definition of the open data
policies in the current EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation
(Horizon 2020). Some obvious considerations came out of the consultation, as dif-
ferent stakeholders, such as private companies, researchers, industry, ICT and data
professionals, publishers, and libraries, have distinct needs with regard to use of
and access to research data. Of course, open access to scientific publications is a
shared requirement, but equally important is to access and reuse related research
results from scientific research projects. In this context, we overview some of the
major initiatives that put the emphasis not only on the openly access and share of
scientific publications but also on related research resources, such as data, models,
algorithms, and software.
* http://www.smartopendata.eu.
† http://www.dopa-project.eu.