Lorenzino Vaccari

European Commission | ec · EUIPO

The APIs4DGov report analyses why, what and how API should be adopted by governments. The purpose of this report is to assess the relevance of APIs in the context of the digital transformation of government. Specifically, the report i) evaluates the current status of API adoption in governments, ii) analyses the value, opportunities and challenges...

The digital transformation of society obliges governments to evolve towards increasingly complex digital environments. These environments require strong coordination efforts to ensure a synergistic integration of different systems and actors. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the connective nodes of digital components and thus instrumen...

The full text with the results of our research is available at: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/application-programming-interfaces-governments-why-what-and-how

This publication is a Science for Policy report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific support to the European policymaking process. The scientific output expressed does not imply a policy position of the European Commission. Neither the European Comm...

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) could greatly facilitate the exchange of data and functionalities between software applications in a flexible, controlled and secure way, especially on the web. Private companies, from startups to enterprises, have been using APIs for several years now, but it is only recently that APIs have seen increased...

From their inception, digital technologies have had a huge impact on our society. In both the private and the public sectors, they have contributed to, or at times driven, change in organisational structures, ways of working, and how products and services are shaped and shared. Governments and public administration units, driven by the digital evol...

This report is an initiative of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the science and knowledge service of the European Commission (EC), supported by the Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO). It highlights drivers shaping the urban future, identifying both the key challenges cities will have to address and the streng...

In less than ten years from its advent in 2008, the concept of #distributedledgers has entered into mainstream research and policy agendas. Enthusiastic reception, fuelled by the success of #Bitcoin and the explosion of potential use cases created high, if not hyped, expectations with respect to the transformative role of #blockchain for the indust...

Blockchain technology (BC) is a new technology that can potentially bring value to governments by providing public services in a more direct and distributed manner. The vast majority of nontechnical literature related to blockchain technology, especially in public sector, focuses on the landscaping of use cases. The major drawback of the landscapin...

This paper presents the approach adopted by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre~(JRC) in order to facilitate open access to its research data crated as support for EU policies, which is also in line with the general Open Data trend. The paper presents various initiatives and incentives that are put in place at the JRC in order to progre...

In this paper, we present a general overview of the perspectives and issues of Big Data and Open Data in a Smart City, with specific implications for the municipality of Trento, Italy. We start by presenting the current state of the art of Big Data and Open Data in Trento and continue by proposing a line of development for these two topics that cou...

The open data movement is demanding publication of data withheld by public institutions. Wide access to government data improves transparency and also fosters economic growth. Still, careless publication of personal data can easily lead to privacy violations. Due to these concerns, the Italian law states that even public deliberations must be anony...

The cultural, historic, and natural diversity in the European Union creates a fertile ground for both policies and innovation that aim at removing obstacles to the integration and interoperability of data regarding Europe’s natural environment. In fact, sharing resources across multiple information communities raises the need for new technologies t...

The concept of multidisciplinary interoperability for managing societal issues is a major challenge presently faced by the Earth and Space Science Informatics community. With this in mind, EuroGEOSS project was launched on May 1st 2009 for a three year period aiming to demonstrate the added value to the scientific community and society of providing...

EuroGEOSS is a research project supporting the development of the GEOSS Common Infrastructure and the multi-disciplinary research efforts needed to address global sustainability research. The framework it has developed to integrate data, services, and models from different disciplines is based on a brokering approach that advances the traditional S...

Matching between concepts describing the meaning of services representing heterogeneous information sources is a key operation in many application domains, including web service coordination, data integration, peer-to-peer information sharing, query answering, and so on. In this paper we present an evaluation of an ontology matching approach, speci...

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), envisioned by the group of eight most industrialized countries (G-8) in 2003, provides the indispensable framework to integrate the Earth observation efforts at a global level. The European Commission also contributes to the implementation of the GEOSS through research projects funded from its...

The implementation of the INSPIRE Directive in Europe and similar efforts around the globe to develop spatial data infrastructures and global systems of systems have been focusing largely on the adoption of agreed technologies, standards, and specifications to meet the (systems) interoperability challenge. Addressing the key scientific challenges o...

This paper elaborates on the importance of the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) format for developing thesauri in the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) and presents a prototype application supporting one of the most important tasks for the harmonisation of SKOS thesauri, i.e., relating independent categorisations of terms th...

This paper outlines the importance of the SKOS format for developing thesauri in the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures and presents a prototype application supporting one of the most important tasks for the harmonisation of thesauri in this domain, i.e., relating independent categorisations of terms that may be developed by distinct thematic...

Today's information systems must operate effectively within open and dynamic environments. This challenge becomes a necessity for crisis management systems. In emergency contexts, in fact, a large number of actors need to collaborate and coordinate in the disaster scenes by exchanging and reporting information with each other and with the people in...

Access to geographic information has radically changed in the past decade. Previously, it was a specific task, for which complex desktop Geographic In- formation Systems (GISs) were built, and geographic data was maintained locally, managed by a restricted number of technicians. With the significant impact of the world-wide-web, an increasing numbe...

Modern information systems are required to operate in distributed and dynamic environments. In such open settings, coordination technologies play a crucial role in the design of flexible software systems. Research efforts in different areas are converging to devise suitable mechanisms for process and peer coordination: in particular, current result...

This deliverable aims at investigating the capability of the OpenKnowledge framework to support centralised as well as decentralised architectures for information gathering in emergency response management. For this purpose, we developed an agent-based e-Response simulation environment fully integrated with the OpenKnowledge infrastructure and thro...

In this deliverable we report on the work carried out for the evaluation and benchmarking of the matching component of the OpenKnowldge kernel. The main goal of the present work has been a extensive evaluation of the approximate Structure-Preserving Semantic Matching (SPSM) algorithm both on a set of synthesized benchmarks, as well as on a set of r...

In this paper we focus on the semantic heterogeneity problem as one of the main challenges in current Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). We first report on the state of the art in reducing such a heterogeneity in SDIs. We then consider a particular geo-service integration scenario. We discuss an approach of how to semantically coordinate geograph...

Access to geographic information has radically changed in the past decade. Previously, it was a specific task, for which complex desktop Geographic Information Systems (GISs) were built, and geographic data was maintained locally, managed by a restricted number of technicians. With the significant impact of the world-wide-web, an increasing number...

Real-world experience teaches us that to manage emergencies, efficient crisis response coordination is crucial; ICT infrastructures are effective in supporting the people involved in such contexts, by supporting effective ways of interaction. They also should provide innovative means of communication and information management. At present, centrali...

All phases of emergency management activities - that we will reference hereafter as eResponse activities - depend on data from a variety of sources and involve a range of different organizations and teams at various administrative levels with their own systems and services. The existence of numerous and different actors, policies, procedures, data...

In this paper a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is proposed to support the interaction with legacy Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the implementation of value added data sharing services. In particular, we base our proposed architecture both on the standardization effort carried out by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and on curr...

In this document we flrst recall the organizational model for the speciflc selected use case ("Flooding in Trentino, Italy") as well as the detailed analysis of the roles of the involved agents. Then, we focus our analysis on the geographical data management scenario, on the current status of available infrastructure and on the overall use case. At...

In this document we first recall the organizational model for the specific selected use case (”Flooding in Trentino, Italy”) as well as the detailed analysis of the roles of the involved agents. Then, we focus our analysis on the geographical data management scenario, on the current status of available infrastructure and on the overall use case. At...

The role of the OpenKnowledge system is to support and enhance the sharing and the efiective use of information and services among difierent actors. In this document we analyze and present a set of scenarios related to emergency response upon which to test the Open- Knowledge system. In particular, we describe the general requirements of the emerge...

In this paper, we will focus on the semantic heterogeneity problem as one of the main challenges in current Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). We first report the state of the art of the current approaches and proposed solutions to overcome such semantic heterogeneity problems, focusing both on geo-services integration and geo-data integration. We...

The implementation of the INSPIRE Directive in Europe and similar efforts around the globe to develop spatial data infrastructures and global systems of systems have been focusing largely on the adoption of agreed technologies, standards, and specifications to meet the (systems) interoperability challenge. Addressing the key scientific challenges o...

Ontology matching is a key problem in many metadata intensive application domains, including emergency response, data integration, peer-to-peer information sharing, web service composition, and query answering on the web. In this paper we present an emergency response scenario based on the organizational model as used in Trentino region, Italy. We...

The automated communication of services is crucial to the success of systems such as the Semantic Web. If global standards (the use of which is problematic) are not strictly adhered to, this requires services to be able to interpret both the vocabulary of calls made to them and the structure of these calls. In this paper, we describe the lifecycle...

Matching between concepts describing the meaning of representing for heterogeneous information sources is a key operation in many application domains, including web service coordination, data integration, peer-to-peer information sharing, query answering, and so on. In this paper we present an evaluation of an ontology matching approach, specically...

In this paper we report our work on the implementation of a semantic geocatalogue for the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) of the Trentino region, Italy.