Dr. Charalampos Bratsas, CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation Greece and Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Technology and Electronic Systems Engineering of the International University of Greece (I.H.U), and Evangelos Chondrokostas, Data Consultant at the Open Knowledge Foundation Greece, attended the Open Knowledge Network meeting in Zurich on June 15th, as well as the Swiss Chapter Annual Forum on June 16th.
On 15th June, during the official Open Knowledge Network Meeting, Evangelos Chondrokostas delivered an insightful presentation about the objectives of the UPCAST project – in which Open Knowledge Foundation Greece participates as a partner – as well as the four real-world pilots that will emerge from this project. He further elaborated on the Thessaloniki pilot, in which Open Knowledge Foundation Greece collaborates with the Major Development Agency Thessaloniki (MDAT). This specific pilot will utilize the tools that will be developed throughout the project’s lifespan to facilitate the sharing of public administration data for climate across the Thessaloniki region. The interactive presentation sparked the interest of representatives from the Open Knowledge Network’s chapters, who expressed their interest in the project’s goals and shared their relevant experience from similar projects.
On 16th June 2023, the Open Knowledge Network’s chapters from Germany, Finland, Sweden, Japan, Nepal, Brazil, and Greece joined the Opendata.ch 2023 annual forum – a day of inspiration, innovation, and networking. Experts from research, business, government, politics, journalism, and civil society joined the forum to discuss the impact of open data and knowledge on transforming our world for the better. The forum was a great chance to meet top speakers from Switzerland and abroad and to network with like-minded individuals. Among those productive and up to date presentations, Dr. Charalampos Bratsas and Evangelos Chondrokostas had the opportunity to further discuss the UPCAST project’s goals and the pilot of Thessaloniki with participants from a wide scientific spectrum.
UPCAST project provides a set of universal, trustworthy, transparent, and user-friendly data market plugins for the automation of data sharing and processing agreements between businesses, public administrations and citizens. The plugins will enable actors in the common European data spaces to design and deploy data exchange and trading operations guaranteeing.
The project will support the deployment of Common European data spaces by consolidating and acting upon mature research in the areas of data management, privacy, monetisation, exchange and automated negotiation, considering efficiency for the environment as well as compliance with EU and national initiatives, AI regulations and ethical procedures.
Four real-world pilots across Europe will operationalise a set of working platform plugins for data sharing, monetisation and trading, deployable across a variety of different data marketplaces and platforms, ensuring digital autonomy of data providers, brokers, users and data subjects, and enabling interoperability within European data spaces. UPCAST project aims at engaging SMEs, administrations and citizens by providing a transferability framework, best practices and training to endow users in order to deploy the new technologies and maximise impact of the project.
