Projects | Green Deal Data Observatory

Data Observatory Labs

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 13:40:00 +0100

Check out our slides. We are still looking for certain partners.

We want to build a network of Innovation Labs, connecting labs and businesses that bring these novel scientific and innovation results nearer to civil society actors, individual creators, and microenterprises in services. We bring data-, sustainability-, rights management innovation, and novel distribution models nearer to the grassroots level of creation. We want to transform scientific and technical development into business development available for small creative organizations without a data engineering/science function.

Table of Contents

WP 1 Coordination

Reprex aims to coordinate this project with a dedicated, experienced Creative Europe project manager who is familiar with the music and audiovisual creation.
Because of the project size and subsidy rate (60%) every partner must contribute to financing WP Project Coordination in proportion to their effective subsidies.

WP Survey Recycling

Utilize the survey harmonization and recycling tools developed in music to be available for film, television, photography, and book publishing users.
Extend harmonized question banks, and remove interoperability and semantic barriers to reuse data from previous audience and policy surveys for these CCSIs.
Subsidize the initial costs in use to transfer from non-reusable market research to reusable, collaborative market research.

WP Heritage Reuse

Utilize the best practices from music archives, film archives, and private photography archives to remove copyright law, ethical, interoperability, and semantic barriers to mix archival/heritage and new content in music, film, and photography (including in books.)
Create a special-purpose record label and audiovisual distributor that specializes in difficult, out-of-commerce/archival/commercial derivative work distribution on global streaming platforms.
Build a best practice for the legal and ethical public performance of derivative works that are made from archival/heritage (which were not deposited with the intent to be commercially used or widely circulated) and new creations.

WP AI & Big Data That Works For Everyone

Utilize the best practices from data feminism, music, and film distribution of niche, marginalized content, and create a general framework that reduces inequalities created by lower data representation (of women, small countries, small languages) that result in new injustice on algorithmic platforms. See publication.
Build new music, film, and photography information services that reduce the data imbalances, and make small language (for example, Estonian) or historically underrepresented (for example, female artists) more likely to be recommended by AI-driven algorithmic platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, or Amazon.
Create open source solutions and open knowledge that enables small, independent music, documentary, photography, and book publishers to build audiences, and monetize content with big data and AI algorithms that work for everyone, not only male artists, English language content, and mainstream works.

Potential partners

Creative enterprises with good YouTube (+Vimeo and other) distribution and rights management track record.
Market research, particularly survey based in film and television.
Services for private collections/collectors.

Who are we?

In 90 secs: conceptual introduction

⚙️/ subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan.

Application Development

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 13:52:00 +0200

We are building and ecosystem of open data, open software and trustworthy algorithms around our data observatories. We collaborate with scientific software developers, and their communities, such as rOpenGov. Our software tools have many thousand users, but they require coding skills. We will soon start to deploy more user-friendly applications that can be used by sustainability reporting professionals, or lawyers preparing factual green disclosures.

The first application is developed in our Eviota project, which builds a multi-language reporting interface in front of our environmental (and economic) impact assessment software tool, iotables. The iotables R package implements most of the functionality laid out in the economic and environmental input-output analysis features in the Eurostat and the respective UN statistical technical guidance on the topic.

Please stay tuned – we will showcase our first app soon.

Greenwashing

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 04:32:00 +0200

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Music Eviota

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 09:40:00 +0100

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

The Eviota project aims to create sustainability reports connected to the financial accounts of companies, NGOs, and civil society actors. The first phase concentrates on greenhouse gases and air pollutants. We want to create reliable estimates of the carbon and other pollutants footprint of music-related (social) enterprises based on their spending (“connected financial and sustainability reporting”.)

Creating connected sustainability reports has many advantages.

It shows consumers, donors, and buyers that the company cares for sustainable growth.
The organization can ask for grants related to increasing sustainability.
In the EU, the company will be eligible for cheaper green loans, green insurance, and green investments.
Large corporations, including music event donors, may require their supply chain to produce credible sustainability metrics.

There are some difficulties that we want to overcome in this project.

Connected financial and sustainability reports are complex, they require plenty of data, and mandatory only for ’large’ corporations. Just like small companies can make ‘simplified tax returns’ and ‘simplified financial reports’, we aim to create a less complex and cheap simplified, connected financial and sustainability report.
Due to the high complexity, they take a long time to create and are costly: the European Commission estimates their total cost at €10,000.

In Europe, there are a handful of large organizations present in the music industry. So, there is no regulatory push for music enterprises to engage in sustainability reporting. However, this means that they cannot benefit from the advantages above.

Table of Contents

Our approach

Most sustainability calculators are very complex because they use many data inputs from the company. Our mission is to reduce the complexity; however, this would require plenty of experience to define the shortcuts. We will compare all spending (upstream value chain or suppliers) and all income (downstream value chain or buyers) to the know spending of all similar organizations in your country in the comparison year.

To reduce the data need, we only take into consideration cost/income groups that meet the financial materiality treshold, i.e. 3% of your total costs or total business-to-business sales.

We offer free, manual calculation in the first phase to ensure we define these simplifications well. To reduce the time needed to collect data about your purchases and sales, we will rely on a part of the “trial balance”, because this is available in your accounting system (and can be exported by your accounting software.) The trial balance is an annual summary of the general ledger accounts. We need only the expenses and revenues accounts, and do not need assets, liabilities, gains and losses.

A part of a fictitious Italian trial balance with Italian and English language labels. The blurred numbers are randomized from an actual trial balance and presented in a different currency than the original.

Why the trial balance?

We start from a document that every company has, and does not require extra management time to prepare, the so-called trial balance. This is an accounting document that can be obtained from the company’s accountant.

A trial balance is a report that lists the balances of all general ledger accounts of a company at a certain point in time. The accounts reflected on a trial balance are related to all major accounting items, including assets, liabilities, equity, revenues, expenses, gains, and losses. It is primarily used to identify the balance of debits and credits entries from the transactions recorded in the general ledger at a certain point in time.

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We do not need the ledger, only the annual account summaries of revenues and expenses.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity. This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

This way we avoid a lot of data entry into the calculator. At this stage, you we do not offer an uploader, because we want to test manually different trial balances before automating the uploading process.

How does it work?

In the future, we hope our calculator will ask the user to upload the trial balance to a secure location, answer a few questions, and get the sustainability report back. Because the trial balance has no strictly defined form (it differs between small, very small, and medium-sized companies, and country to country), we need to do some manual reporting to standardize this procedure.

We use the trial balance (see examples of a trial balance), because that is a standard document that your accountant has about all your purchases and all your sales.

We compare your company’s supply purchases and sales with all similar companies in your country and industry for the comparison year. In this example, we compare the data of Hungarian publisher’s GHG emissions using the purchases in its trial balance with the emissions of all Hungarian publishers (based on their data reported to the tax authorities) in 2020.

Currently your accountant creates two documents, which are binded together and published by law in one “book”, your (Simplified) Annual Report. In Europe, all micro- and small companies create a Simplified Annual Report.

the annual (simplified) balance sheet
the annual (simplified) profit and loss statement

Using exactly the same data, i.e. the “trial balance”, and adding sustainability data, we will create a third document: 3. The annual (simplified) sustainability report, which is a non-financial disclosure of the annual report.

Process: From your data to the final report

We sign a non-disclosure agreement.
You send us your trial balance.
We create a first draft of your carbon footprint. We categorize your suppliers (costs) and buyers (income) into 64 categories for which we have reliable data. See methodology below.
Most of our calculations are made with iotables, our scientific and open source software. We rely on open data from the Green Deal Data Observatory, which in turn processes reliable data of Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency in readily usable format. The use of open source reporting tools and open data helps keep our costs low.
We set up a short call with you and your accountant to make some clarifications.
We provide you the final report.

What is the report?

The report is technically a non-financial disclosure (NFD) of your annual financial report, which currently consists of the balance sheet, the profit and loss statement. You can add an optional sustainability report as a third part.

The making of an NFD is not mandatory for small- and medium sized companies and NGOs that usually produce simplified financial reports.
It is two paragraphs of factual text, accompanies with a table and chart about how much greenhouse gases (or other pollutants) are created by your activities.
A sustainability report is a first step to factual sustainability management and avoiding greenwashing. When you know factually how your activities (including purchases from your suppliers) cause greenhouse gas emissions (or contribute to the gender paygap), you can devise steps to reduce your negative impact, or increase your positive impact.
We work with reliable expert advice so that you can act in a credible way, and make credible promises to your customers, your audience, your donors, granting agencies, bank, insurance, or investors.

Methodology

We follow the CPA classification for your suppliers and corporate buyers. See Statistical Classification of Products by Activity Some categories, like B MINING AND QUARRYING are aggregated, i.e. we cannot make a distintion among various mining activities. In service industries this is not required.
We use the same data for comparators that states use to monitor the Paris Accord. We use the categories of the System of National Accounts, which is harmonized on the level of the EU and the level of the UN. In 2022 we only work with EU and candidate countries that follow the EU version, and we’ll adjust our software in 2023 for the rest of the world.
Our sustainability methodology is based on the Global GHG Accounting & Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry.
We follow the EFRAG’s Proposals for a Relevant and Dynamic EU Sustainability Reporting Standard Setting (pdf download) because this will be the basis of future, mandatory reporting standards in Europe.
We will help small music organizations in their sustainability reporting, where detail data and reporting standards are only available for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Music Eviota project is supported by the MusicAIRE.

Open collaboration

Our project is based on open collaboration. Our proposal, provides us with resources to supply further music businesses, music civil society organizations and researchers with high-quality data (during the duration of the project for free.) We are already looking for interested parties to put our data and research projects into use and validate their usability and quality in real-life policy or business development scenarios.

Why are we developing this service?

The European Green Deal, which includes the proposed Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and the sustainable finance package, aims to set the European economy on a permanent decarbonization and sustainability increasing path with adjusting the rules how economic activities are financed by bank loans, insurance, investments, and direct subsidies. From 2023, it will be cheaper to get loans, insurance, and other types of funding for organizations that can prove that they follow the environmental, social and governance path set out in the Paris Agreement and other UN, OECD, and EU agreements.

Requirements for connecting financial and sustainability reporting.

Correct and reliable sustainability management will come with many financial advantages and increased responsibility. The European Financial Reporting Advisory Board is currently preparing the new combined financial and sustainability reporting standard that will be used in banks, insurance, investment, granting, and the large companies of Europe in their entire supply and purchaser chain. The European Commission estimates that compliance costs until the end of 2023 will amount to 4 billion euros, with reporting and auditing costs mounting 10,000 euros per organization. While music small and medium sized organizations (MSMEs) and limited liability civil society organizations (CSOs) will be exempted from mandatory sustainability management and audited reporting, they can still comply in a non-audited and voluntary way.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollution, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. Our previous research shows that particularly the live music industry that needs a large workforce, suffers from underuse of, and discrimination of female workers in various technical and even managerial roles. Our system will be able to flag risks of gender paygap and related issues in the entire value chain and of course, provide good benchmarks for internal activities.

Our review of the environmental, social and governance risk management (ESG sustainability management) suggests that complying with ESG standards is not only a pre-requisite to get cheaper loans (less important) and cheaper insurance (very important in live music), but also a requirement by corporate sponsors of events, and even a large part of the audience. While some music organizations already provide sustainability reporting, they are not standardized and are less factual as they are not connected to accounting information at every point. Our solution aims to give much credibility to both the sustainability reports and non-financial disclosures of the financial reports (which are not mandatory for MSMEs but increase their trustworthiness on an elective basis if they are included.)

Growing interest for ESG in select countries.

Future plans: Social Sustainability and Anti-Bribary

MusicAIRE Green Recovery in the Music Sector

Co-funded by the European Union

The objectives of the MusicAIRE GREEN recovery program is increasing the music sector’s environmental sustainability and ecological awareness with a view to greening the music industry, in particular live acts, festivals and touring, as well as supporting innovative start-ups aiming at decreasing the environmental footprint of online data storing and music distribution.

Co-funded by the European Union

Eviota

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The European Union is introducing a ground-breaking accounting standard which will call on about 49,000 enterprises to assess their ‘double materiality’, i.e. both the financial and sustainability impacts of their own activities, as well as those of their buyers and suppliers. Does your company buy cattle or sheep products to produce meat? You must consider the methane emissions of your suppliers. Do you manufacture cars? You must account for the fuel emissions of the buyers and users of your product.

Why Eviota?

We named Eviota after a small fish that lives symbiotically among the tentacles of the mushroom coral. It not only rhymes with our software, iotables, but it refers to the fragile ecosystem of coral reefs: miraculous and beautiful forms of life under threat from global warming. The first step of saving our planet is to objectively detect where your organization’s stakeholders – suppliers, buyers, workers, technology – leave an impact on the environment.

Creating connected sustainability reports has many advantages.

It shows consumers, donors, and buyers that the company cares for sustainable growth.
The organization can ask for grants related to increasing sustainability.
In the EU, the company will be eligible for cheaper green loans, green insurance, and green investments.
Large corporations, including music event donors, may require their supply chain to produce credible sustainability metrics.

There are some difficulties that we want to overcome in this project.

Connected financial and sustainability reports are complex, they require plenty of data, and mandatory only for ’large’ corporations. Just like small companies can make ‘simplified tax returns’ and ‘simplified financial reports’, we aim to create a less complex and cheap simplified, connected financial and sustainability report.
Due to the high complexity, they take a long time to create and are costly: the European Commission estimates their total cost at €10,000.

Table of Contents

Our approach

To reduce the data need, we only take into consideration cost/income groups that meet the financial materiality treshold, i.e. 3% of your total costs or total business-to-business sales.

Why the trial balance?

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We do not need the ledger, only the annual account summaries of revenues and expenses.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity. This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

How does it work?

We use the trial balance (see examples of a trial balance), because that is a standard document that your accountant has about all your purchases and all your sales.

the annual (simplified) balance sheet
the annual (simplified) profit and loss statement

Process: From your data to the final report

We sign a non-disclosure agreement.
You send us your trial balance.
We create a first draft of your carbon footprint. We categorize your suppliers (costs) and buyers (income) into 64 categories for which we have reliable data. See methodology below.
Most of our calculations are made with iotables, our scientific and open source software. We rely on open data from the Green Deal Data Observatory, which in turn processes reliable data of Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency in readily usable format. The use of open source reporting tools and open data helps keep our costs low.
We set up a short call with you and your accountant to make some clarifications.
We provide you the final report.

What is the report?

The making of an NFD is not mandatory for small- and medium sized companies and NGOs that usually produce simplified financial reports.
It is two paragraphs of factual text, accompanies with a table and chart about how much greenhouse gases (or other pollutants) are created by your activities.
A sustainability report is a first step to factual sustainability management and avoiding greenwashing. When you know factually how your activities (including purchases from your suppliers) cause greenhouse gas emissions (or contribute to the gender paygap), you can devise steps to reduce your negative impact, or increase your positive impact.
We work with reliable expert advice so that you can act in a credible way, and make credible promises to your customers, your audience, your donors, granting agencies, bank, insurance, or investors.

Methodology

We follow the CPA classification for your suppliers and corporate buyers. See Statistical Classification of Products by Activity Some categories, like B MINING AND QUARRYING are aggregated, i.e. we cannot make a distintion among various mining activities. In service industries this is not required.
We use the same data for comparators that states use to monitor the Paris Accord. We use the categories of the System of National Accounts, which is harmonized on the level of the EU and the level of the UN. In 2022 we only work with EU and candidate countries that follow the EU version, and we’ll adjust our software in 2023 for the rest of the world.
Our sustainability methodology is based on the Global GHG Accounting & Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry.
We follow the EFRAG’s Proposals for a Relevant and Dynamic EU Sustainability Reporting Standard Setting (pdf download) because this will be the basis of future, mandatory reporting standards in Europe.
We will help small music organizations in their sustainability reporting, where detail data and reporting standards are only available for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Music Eviota project is supported by the MusicAIRE.

Open collaboration

Why are we developing this service?

Requirements for connecting financial and sustainability reporting.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollution, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. Our previous research shows that particularly the live music industry that needs a large workforce, suffers from underuse of, and discrimination of female workers in various technical and even managerial roles. Our system will be able to flag risks of gender paygap and related issues in the entire value chain and of course, provide good benchmarks for internal activities.

Growing interest for ESG in select countries.

Future plans: Social Sustainability and Anti-Bribary

MusicAIRE Green Recovery in the Music Sector

Co-funded by the European Union

EU Datathon 2021

Wed, 12 May 2021 18:09:00 +0000

Reprex, a Dutch start-up enterprise formed to utilize open source software and open data, is looking for partners in an agile, open collaboration to win at least one of the three EU Datathon Prizes. We are looking for policy partners, academic partners and a consultancy partner. Our project is based on agile, open collaboration with three types of contributors.

With our competing prototypes we want to show that we have a research automation technology that can find open data, process it and validate it into high-quality business, policy or scientific indicators, and release it with daily refreshments in a modern API.

We are looking for institutions to challenge us with their data problems, and sponsors to increase our capacity. Over then next 5 months, we need to find a sustainable business model for a high-quality and open alternative to other public data programs.

The EU Datathon 2021 Challenge

To take part, you should propose the development of an application that links and uses open datasets. - our data curator team
Your application … is also expected to find suitable new approaches and solutions to help Europe achieve important goals set by the European Commission through the use of open data.” - this application is developed by our technology contributors
Your application should showcase opportunities for concrete business models or social enterprises. - our service development team is working to make this happen!
We use open source software and open data. The applications are hosted on the cloud resources of Reprex, an early-stage technology startup currently building a viable, open-source, open-data business model to create reproducible research products.
We are working together with experts in the domain as curators (check out our guidelines if you want to join: Data Curators: Get Inspired!).
Our development team works on an open collaboration basis. Our indicator R packages, and our services are developed together with rOpenGov.

Mission statement

We want to win an EU Datathon prize by processing the vast, already-available governmental and scientific open data made usable for policy-makers, scientific researchers, and business researcher end-users.

“To take part, you should propose the development of an application that links and uses open datasets. Your application should showcase opportunities for concrete business models or social enterprises. It is also expected to find suitable new approaches and solutions to help Europe achieve important goals set by the European Commission through the use of open data.”

We aim to win at least one first prize in the EU Datathon 2021. We are contesting all three challenges, which are related to the EU’s official strategic policies for the coming decade.

Challenge 1: A European Grean Deel

Our Green Deal Data Observatory connects socio-economic and environmental data to help understanding and combating climate change.

Challenge 1: A European Green Deal, with a particular focus on the The European Climate Pact, the Organic Action Plan, and the New European Bauhaus, i.e., mitigation strategies.

Climate change and environmental degradation are an existential threat to Europe and the world. To overcome these challenges, the European Union created the European Green Deal strategic plan, which aims to make the EU’s economy sustainable by turning climate and environmental challenges into opportunities and making the transition just and inclusive for all.

Our Green Deal Data Observatory is a modern reimagination of existing ‘data observatories’; currently, there are over 70 permanent international data collection and dissemination points. One of our objectives is to understand why the dozens of the EU’s observatories do not use open data and reproducible research. We want to show that open governmental data, open science, and reproducible research can lead to a higher quality and faster data ecosystem that fosters growth for policy, business, and academic data users.

We provide high quality, tidy data through a modern API which enables data flows between public and proprietary databases. We believe that introducing Open Policy Analysis standards with open data, open-source software, and research automation, can help the Green Deal policymaking process. Our collaboration is open for individuals, citizens scientists, research institutes, NGOS, and companies.

Challenge 2: An economy that works for people

Our Economy Data Observatory will focus on competition, small and medium sized enterprizes and robotization.

Challenge 2: An economy that works for people, with a particular focus on the Single market strategy, and particular attention to the strategy’s goals of 1. Modernising our standards system, 2. Consolidating Europe’s intellectual property framework, and 3. Enabling the balanced development of the collaborative economy strategic goals.

Big data and automation create new inequalities and injustices and have the potential to create a jobless growth economy. Our Economy Data Observatory is a fully automated, open source, open data observatory that produces new indicators from open data sources and experimental big data sources, with authoritative copies and a modern API.

Our observatory monitors the European economy to protect consumers and small companies from unfair competition, both from data and knowledge monopolization and robotization. We take a critical Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME)-, intellectual property, and competition policy point of view of automation, robotization, and the AI revolution on the service-oriented European social market economy.

We would like to create early-warning, risk, economic effect, and impact indicators that can be used in scientific, business, and policy contexts for professionals who are working on re-setting the European economy after a devastating pandemic in the age of AI. We are particularly interested in designing indicators that can be early warnings for killer acquisitions, algorithmic and offline discrimination against consumers based on nationality or place of residence, and signs of undermining key economic and competition policy goals. Our goal is to help small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups to grow, and to furnish data that encourages the financial sector to provide loans and equity funds for their growth.

Challenge 3: A Europe fit for the digital age

Our Digital Music Observatory is not only a demo of the European Music Observatory, but a testing ground for data governance, Digital Servcies Act, and trustworthy AI problems.

Challenge 3: A Europe fit for the digital age, with a particular focus Artificial Intelligence, the European Data Strategy, the Digital Services Act, Digital Skills and Connectivity.

The Digital Music Observatory (DMO) is a fully automated, open source, open data observatory that creates public datasets to provide a comprehensive view of the European music industry. It provides high-quality and timely indicators in all four pillars of the planned official European Music Observatory as a modern, open source and largely open data-based, automated, API-supported alternative solution for this planned observatory. The insight and methodologies we are refining in the DMO are applicable and transferable to about 60 other data observatories funded by the EU which do not currently employ governmental or scientific open data.

Music is one of the most data-driven service industries where most sales are currently executed by AI-driven autonomous systems that influence market shares and intellectual property remuneration. We provide a template that enables making these AI-driven systems accountable and trustworthy, with the goal of re-balancing the legitimate interests of creators, distributors, and consumers. Within Europe, this new balance will be an important use case of the European Data Strategy and the Digital Services Act.

The DMO is a fully functional service that can serve as a testing ground of the European Data Strategy. It can showcase the ways in which the music industry is affected by the problems that the Digital Services Act and European Trustworthy AI initiatives attempt to regulate. It is being built in open collaboration with national music stakeholders, NGOs, academic institutions, and industry groups.

Our Product/Market Fit was validated in the world’s 2nd ranked university-backed incubator program, the Yes!Delft AI Validation Lab. We are currently developing this project with the help of the JUMP European Music Market Accelerator program.

Problem Statement

The EU has an 18-year-old open data regime and it makes public taxpayer-funded data in the values of tens of billions of euros per year; the Eurostat program alone handles 20,000 international data products, including at least 5,000 pan-European environmental indicators.

As open science principles gain increased acceptance, scientific researchers are making hundreds of thousands of valuable datasets public and available for replication every year.

The EU, the OECD, and UN institutions run around 100 data collection programs, so-called ‘data observatories’ that more or less avoid touching this data, and buy proprietary data instead. Annually, each observatory spends between 50 thousand and 3 million EUR on collecting untidy and proprietary data of inconsistent quality, while never even considering open data.

Our automated data observatories are modern reimaginations of the existing observatories that do not use open data and research automation.

The problem with the current EU data strategy is that while it produces enormous quantities of valuable open data, in the absence of common basic data science and documentation principles, it seems often cheaper to create new data than to put the existing open data into shape.

This is an absolute waste of resources and efforts. With a few R packages and our deep understanding of advanced data science techniques, we can create valuable datasets from unprocessed open data. In most domains, we are able to repurpose data originally created for other purposes at a historical cost of several billions of euros, converting these unused data assets into valuable datasets that can replace tens of millions’ worth of proprietary data.

What we want to achieve with this project – and we believe such an accomplishment would merit one of the first prizes - is to add value to a significant portion of pre-existing EU open data (for example, available on data.europa.eu/data) by re-processing and integrating them into a modern, tidy database with an API access, and to find a business model that emphasises a triangular use of data in 1. business, 2. science and 3. policy-making. Our mission is to modernize the concept of data observatories.

Our solution

We are empowering data curators with reproducible research solutions to create high-quality, rigorously tested original datasets from low quality, not validated, not tidy open data. We help them to design meaningful business, policy or scientific indicators and provide them with a software and API to keep the data up-to-date. We help them deposit a copy of the authoritative, uncompromised dataset onto Zenodo, the EU’s data repository, with a DOI or new DOI version.
We create a research workflow that periodically (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually) collects, corrects and re-processes the data. We use peer-reviewed statistical software and unit-tests to make sure that the data is sound.

Panning out gold from muddy open sources - with automation technology.

We add value with correcting open (and proprietary!) data problems that make open data hard to use, and proprietary, in-house data hard to re-use.
- regions corrects inconsistent geographical coding. Eurostat has no mandate to correct geographical coding, and member states do not historically adjust their data. With many thousands of parish, county, region, province, state boundary changes within states, regional and metropolitian area datasets are not usable without our software.
- iotables puts extremely complex national accounts data into actually useful environmental and economic impact indicators. Instead of working with each country separately, our standardized system can calculate direct and indirect effects, as well as multipliers for every European country that works in the European statistical framework (EU member states, EEA, UK, member candidates.)
- retroharmonize connects cross-sectional surveys with non-European countries, puts pan-European surveys into time series, and corrects regional subsamples. We are creating new indicators from Eurobarometer, Afrobarometer, Arab Barometer, and standardized CAP surveys, as well as other harmonized surveys. We help design surveys that can utilize data from already existing, openly available surveys.
We place the authoritative copy to a data repository (Zenodo or Dataverse), automatically document the data, and make it available in a modern API for SQL queries or CSV downloads.
We present the data with commentary and blog posts from our curators (see: Is Drought Risk Uninsurable? - solidarity and climate change in Belgium) and contributors on a semi-automatically refreshed, open source web portal.
We are perfecting the agile open collaboration model in a triangular setting, where corporate users, scientific researchers, public and non-governmental policy makers, and even citizen scientists can work around a single data ecoystem.
We are validating a business model that allows the commercial, scientific, and policy use of re-processed, high quality data products made from open and shared data.

Make Coal History

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We find it difficult to imagine a path to net zero emissions that includes the use coal as a fuel. We would like to map communities in the world that still depend on coal mining.

Data curated by Milos

What?: We put coal mining areas on the global map? Why?: It allows us to connect coal mining to opinions about climate change and socio-economic indicators of communities. Use cases: Understanding how many people need an alternative to living from coal mining. Political dynamics of accepting climate change policies and individual climate action. Skills needed: Knowing where coal is mined in your country. How can you contribute:

Mapping Sub-national Boundaries

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Working with sub-national data, on the level of provinces, states, regions, metropolitan areas brings far more insights into climate policies and potential actions than working with national data. The United States is a country, and so is Malta. China is a country, and so is Qatar. We believe that comparing Sydney Metropolitan Area with Paris Metropolitan Area, West Australia with Asturias in Spain is a far more fruitful approach.

Data curated by Daniel

What?: We want to integrate non-European sub-national boundaries, covered by the ISO 3166-2 standard into our regions package, similarly to Wikipedia and its sub-natioal maps. Why?: We can compare more homogeneous, more similar parts of the world with each other, we can compare social, economic, environmental variables and public opinion change in a far more relevant manner. Use cases: Understanding how many people need an alternative to living from coal mining. Political dynamics of accepting climate change policies and individual climate action. Skills needed: How can you contribute:

Finding out how can we parse data fairly from the ISO Online Browsing Platform
Writing the parsing code in R
Testing the parsing code in R
Writing tutorials
Finding ways to connect ISO 3166-2 sub-national boundaries with other sub-national boundaries, such as Europe’s NUTS.