Madrid: 12 September 2008

The presentations and supporting materials from the third ePSIplus Thematic Meeting on Information Management Standards and Data Quality that was hosted by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid have been published. Over 35 experts attended the meeting from across Europe. The experts considered ten different perspectives and initiatives on how to deliver and meet the requirement of the European Union Directive 2003/98/EC framework on the re-use of public sector information with respect to Asset Lists (data discovery mechanisms.)

The presentations and debate raised a number of interesting points, which included amongst others:

• The need for incentives and regulation (carrots and sticks!) with respect to creating and maintaining Asset Lists.
• The impact of the INSPIRE Directive with respect to certain sectors of public sector information. For example geographic information.
• The impact of other Information Society initiatives such as the European Digital Library.
• The public sector benefits (gains) from creating and managing information asset lists.
• Whether the focus should be on interoperability of what currently exists rather than a focus on harmonisation through adoption of a European Meta Data standard.
• How to address the lessons learnt from past Asset List (Metadata) initiatives such as the PSI Navigator initiative.
• The importance of information discovery tools such as Asset Lists to the development of the reuse of public sector information in down stream information products and services within the European knowledge economy.
• Alternative ways of discovering what information the public sector holds in the absence of Asset lists.
• The role of electronic transactions (without human involvement) that need registries of information assets and services.
• The quality of an Asset List. It maybe better to have no Asset List rather than low quality asset lists which may mislead!
• Whether the current and emerging technologies would assist.

The meeting was more technical oriented than business case oriented.

In preparation for the meeting a survey was undertaken on the presence of existing Asset Registers (Lists) within Member States. An analysis of the survey will be included in the meeting report that will be published in the coming months.