Monday, September 20, 2010

Spanish newspaper Cinco Días reviews economic opportunities of information reuse and turns its eyes towards Euroalert.net

Reached this point of year 2010, there is one thing which is quite clear by now: open data movement is a top value and it is here to stay. Throughout the whole year a lot of announcements have been made by administrations, businesses and citizen movements, which have all added efforts in order to make public sector information reuse to gain momentum. Today, it has been the case for the Spanish economic daily Cinco Días, which has published an article in its SME supplement making an overview of business opportunities brought by public open data in machine readable formats suitable for automatic processing (here you have a pdf version of the article – sorry, it is only available in Spanish).

In July, it was the newspaper El País who mentioned Euroalert.net as an example in its article about public open data, and now it is Cinco Días' turn to include Euroalert.net among the reference services regarding the creation of value from public sector information. We are really proud to be mentioned with companies such as LegalSolo or projects of great benefit to Catalan citizens as Rodalia.info, a group of excellent entrepreneurs with whom we share values and concerns. It was a real pleasure having the opportunity to meet them in person at the PSI Meeting 2010 organized by Project Aporta and ePSIplatform.

It is quite good news to know that not only Obama, Gordon Brown or David Cameron listened to the call from the web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee to flood the web with public data in order to create new products and services. Although Spain has still a long way to walk to reach the point of pioneer countries, the fact that financial newspapers show interest for the potential of the sector as a source of business opportunities, will certainly help to make improvements and maybe to create new political bets. For the moment we stick to two good examples of public initiatives mentioned in the article which have been put forward by the Government of the Basque Country (Open Data Euskadi) and the Government from the Principality of Asturias, as main Spanish references regarding public open data.

Once again, we really must thank you, all members of Euroalert.net community, for your daily support which is helping us to grow and gain relevance in on-line information about the European Union for companies and institutions. But above all, this recognition gives us more support to keep on working with even more determination in order for Euroalert.net to create the first pan-European platform for information services in international public procurement.

Euroalert.net will be at the Governamental Linked Open Data networking session at the ICT 2010

During the last week of September Euroalert.net will be at the "ICT2010: Digitally Driven" event, just the week before our next visit to Brussels for the Open Days 2010. Further to covering for all of you the most important European event for ICT research and innovation, Euroalert.net will be very specially present at the Networking session on Governmental Linked Data taking place on 28 September.

This will be the occasion for us to meet some of the members of the Open Data community we only know “digitally” for the moment, through the intense communication and collaboration we have been sharing over the past months. Besides “devirtualising” some people like Jonathan Gray from the OKFN, we will also meet some old friends like Jose Manual Alonso from Fundación CTIC.

As all of you know well, Euroalert.net has been trying to do its bit in the development of open data and the reuse of public sector information by participating in some major events related to it such as FICOD 2009 or by taking part in the PSI Meeting 2010. Euroalert.net keeps close contact with the most relevant actors within the Open Data community in Europe and is devoting an important share of time and resources to encourage the release of data in our area of activity and expertise: public procurement. As a contribution to the community, we document and release these experiences through the project Showmethetenders.net, open to collaboration from any stakeholder and interested party.

We are sure that the networking session at the ICT 2010 will be a quite valuable opportunity to learn from other experiences which are being developed in almost every corner in Europe. It will also be the occasion to meet people whose vision will help us to develop services more and more useful for the whole Euroalert.net comunity.

As for the 10,000 squere meters of exhibition and the three days of conferences, keep an eye on Euroalert.net Twitter account and to our web, we will bring you the most interesting things we see during the three days of the ICT 2010. For those of you who can't make it to be in Brussels, the hash-tag for the event will be #ict2010eu. And don't forget you can still register for the event if you are able to come to Brussels. Will be great to meet you there!