If appleseed had an open portal : making sense of data, SEIS and integrated systems for the Maltese Islands

Abstract

Much sought and realistically distant, an open data system can serve as the Holy Grail for many a policy-maker and decision taker as well as the operational entities involved in the field. The steady seeding of data-related legislative tools has aided the setting up of exploratory and active systems that serve the concept of data-information-knowledge-action to academia, the general public and the implementing agencies. Legislation, inclusive of Data Protection, Freedom of Information, Public Sector Information, Aarhus, INSPIRE, SEIS and the still embryonic SENSE, have all managed to create a new reality that may be too complex for some still caught in a jurassic analogue stage where data hoarding might still be prevalent and little effort is made to jump to the post-modern reality. Efforts to push the process through various domains such as census, environment protection, spatial development and crime have helped the Maltese Islands to create a scenario that is ripe for a national data infrastructure, inter-entity data exchange, open data structuring, and free dissemination services. This process enhances the knowledge-base and reduces redundancy, whilst creating new challenges on how to make sense of all the data being made available, particularly in the interpretation or misinterpretation of the outputs. The paper reviews Malta’s process to go through the birth pains of SEIS as an open data construct, through to the dissemination of various spatial datasets and the first open portals pertaining to the various regulatory directives.