EU Regulation on Standardisation approved by European Parliament

Just a short notice... A couple of minutes ago the European Parliament approved the new EU Regulation on Standardisation. The Rapporteur, Lara Comi, shared via Twitter that the outstanding support of 639 votes out of 676. This is an excellent result. Especially for the ICT sector the outcome is very important because it will allow global ICT specifications, global Open Standards in the field of ICT, to be directly referenced in public procurement in Europe.

Congratulations to Lara Comi and the European Parliament on this result. The Parliament did further improve the document and the outcome will be a very good new framework for standardisation and the development and use of standards in Europe. 

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UPDATE of Sep 11, 16:00h:

Press release of the European Parliament available on News website of the EP 

Public reaction from stakeholders - OpenForum Europe press release.

German government publishes study on Open Government Data

The German government last week published a study on “Open Government Data” and announced that they will follow the key recommendation from the study and set up a pilot for an open government portal which shall be in place by 2013. The study was done by Fraunhofer Fokus and is available on the website of the German Ministry ofDomestic Affairs (Bundesinnenministerium). There are both the full study with over 570 pages and a short version. And the ministry also published the spreadsheet with basicreference data – and to my great pleasure they published it in astandard document version, too, in ODF with the file format .ods. All documents are available in German only.

This is another examples where an EU Member State joins the initiative of the EU Commission for open data – laid down as a key action in the Digital Agenda for Europe and referring to the PSI Directive (Public Sector Information). What is good news: the German study concludes that given the legal situation of today a huge amount of public data can already be made open without problems:

The benefit of making public data openly available is clearly described. It can help to create innovative new solutions and process optimisation. In general, the study sees that there will be an increasing demand for public data in the coming years. On this basis there are a number of supposed economic potentials for the use of public data which justify to make the data openly available at no or little cost:

“[Es geht um die Nutzung der] angenommenen ökonomischen Potenziale der Datennutzung. So können staatliche Daten sowohl als »Rohstoff« für Start-up-Unternehmen und neue Geschäftsmodelle als auch als essenziell zur Optimierung von Geschäftsprozessen in diversen Branchen betrachtet werden. Der privatwirtschaftliche Bedarf an staatlichen Daten wird im Zuge der weiteren technologischen Vernetzung perspektivisch zunehmen. Zur Stimulierung des ökonomischen Potenzials staatlicher Daten haben viele Behörden in Europa ihre Datenbestände geöffnet, Geldleistungen reduziert und Geldleistungsmodelle vereinfacht. Fallstudien zeigen die Korrelation zwischen der Höhe der Geldleistung und der Nutzung von Verwaltungsdaten durch Wirtschaftsakteure, die zur Stimulierung der Volkswirtschaft beiträgt.” [Short version, p. 8]

Standardisation and the agreement on standards play a key role in the study and in the recommendations. This refers both to the simplification and optimisation of process standards and to format standards for making the data available. The latter aspect is specifically addressed in recommendation 44:

“Sofern ein Standard bereits in SAGA klassifiziert wurde, wurde die Klassifikation übernommen. Für bestimmte Datenkategorien sind daher nur »empfohlene« Standards gelistet. Grundsätzlich sollte mindestens ein Standard für Tabellen und ggf. auch für weitere Datenkategorien als »verbindlich« klassifiziert werden, um die Interoperabilität zu steigern.”

 Bottom line of this recommendation: SAGA, the Geman National Interoperability Framework for eGovernment, is the basic reference point regarding technology standards. And some level of communality, of having “mandatory standards”, is necessary for achieving interoperability.

Moreover, as addressed in recommendation 53, it is important to have agreed standards on the level of metadata – and to strive for pan-European agreements in this respect, as well:

“Die OGPD-Plattform wird dann zu einem gut nutzbaren Informationsportal, wenn die in der OGPD Plattform bereitgestellten Metadaten einem einheitlichen und von allen Akteuren getragenen Metadatenschema folgen. Daher ist für den Prototyp ein OGPD-Metadatenschema auf Basis der Ausarbeitungen der Studie zu entwickeln. Dieses ist entlang nationaler und internationaler Entwicklungen kontinuierlich zu aktualisieren. So ist eine Verankerung des OGPD-Metadatenschemas bei der KoSIT empfehlenswert. Zudem sollten sich die OGPD-Verantwortlichen auf EU-Ebene engagieren, um ein zum deutschen kompatibles europäisches Open-Government-Data-Metadatenschema mitzugestalten.”

The full details are discussed in chapter IV.4 of the long version of the study. Very good and interesting is the relation that is seen between SAGA and Open Data. The objective of the Open Data initiative is to strive for Open Standards. This builds on the basic principles of SAGA to achieve openness and interoperability, while, in the context of Open Data, Open Standards and Machine Readability of the data are a key principle for allowing everybody to make use of the data and innovate without facing restrictions. The following illustration is copied from the German study: 

My first impression of the study is very good. It is definitely worth reading. I am very much looking forward to the implementation of the recommendations and am positive that this will have a highly positive effect for Open Data in Germany - and beyond. 

EU Regulation on Standardisation - Good agreements reached in legal decision making process

For those of you who followed my posts on the European standardisation reform and the legal package presented almost exactly a year ago by the European Commission there is great news: The IMCO committee of the European parliament published just yesterday the so called four column document showing the compromise agreement that was reached in the trilogue negotiations between the European Council, the European Parliament and the Commission.

What is most important for ICT is Recitals 20 - 21, Chapter IV and Annex II. While there had been some debate about the who should vote on recognising ICT specifications from global fora/consortia - whether EU comitology rules and the examination procedure should be applied - the final agreement reached is very good. It goes for a lean process including necessary checks and balances by requiring consultation of the ICT multi-stakholder Platform established by the Commission and of the Committee set up by the corresponding act of Union harmonisation legislation.

With this excellent outcome of the legislative process the way is now open for Europe to make use of innovative IT technologies standardised in global fora and consortia. These will complement the European Standards developed by the European Standardisation Organisations. So the grounds are being laid for increasing the use of standards and specifications in public procurement in order to further promote interoperability and reduce lock-in situations.

Relevant link: standards and open source

For those interested in the intersection of patents and standards and in how open source and patents and copyright included in standards relate there is a very informed and informative position availalbe - written by Iain Mitchell QC and Stephen Mason. The document is openly available for everyone on the website of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review.

Relevant link of today: OData moves to OASIS

Microsoft announced today that they move the standardisation work on OData into OASIS. The Open Data Protocol Technical Committee is supported by Citrix Systems Inc., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Progress Software, SAP AG and WSO2. See the full press release at the Microsoft website.

Relevant link of today: Thoughts on Cloud

Everybody talks about the Cloud and its potential for growth and innovation. Yet, the Cloud will only be successful if it works properly and if the services which the clients and users want are delivered. In his blog post Angel Diaz dives into the different aspects around Cloud and the respective service level agreements (SLAs). Definitely worth reading - both for Cloud experts and novices.

European Standardisation Reform - good analysis on critical issues

I would like to draw your attention to an article from Paul Meller published in the EuropeanVoice. Paul provides a very good overview and analysis of the current discussions and negotiations regarding the EU standardisation reform - focussing on the impact on ICT standards.

The text is also duplicated on the OpenForum Europe website. Definitely worth reading.

Just to give you an appetizer:

"The Commission wants to be able to recognise ICT standards from the likes of the W3C, with national governments, formal standards bodies and industry – forming what has been dubbed the European Multi-Stakeholder Platform – playing an advisory role only.

"National governments disagree. They want to have decision-making powers to approve or block standards from industry forums and consortia. By holding out for voting powers, national governments appear to have missed the point of recognising standards from industry fora and consortia. The idea is not to mandate the use of such standards in public procurements. It is simply to allow public authorities to refer to these standards in their calls for tender. If the Council of Ministers succeeds in securing voting power, as opposed to a simple advisory role for the platform, this will deter civil servants on the front line from using the very technologies that have spurred such extraordinary innovation in the private sector."

This is exactly why the new Regulation is so vital for ICT in Europe and why a smooth process to be established is important to ensure success - to the benefit of Europe.