Brussels: 3 December 2008

The European Commission has published the draft ICT Policy Support Programme (PSP) work programme for 2009. The document titled: Competitiveness and Innovation framework programme (CIP), ICT policy support programme, Draft ICT PSP Work Programme 2009 (63 pages) was approved by the Programme Committee on 21 November 2008. The call is expected to be in February 2009 with a closing date for submissions of June 2009. The call reference is stated as: CIP-ICT PSP-2009-3.

Section 2.2 of the report (page 4) states:

“The uptake of ICT and exploitation of digital content in areas of public interest like health, inclusion, cultural heritage, public sector information, learning, public administrations, or energy efficiency requires more proactive policies.”

Section 2.4.2 of the report (page 6) states:

“Complementing the actions supported in 2007 and 2008 in ICT PSP and in eContentplus, the work programme focuses on 8 themes in 2009. Those themes are:

• ICT for health, ageing and inclusion
• Digital Libraries
• ICT for government and governance
• ICT for energy efficiency and environment
• Multilingual Web
• Public Sector information
• Internet evolution and security (including RFID)
• Open innovation, user experience and living labs”

Objective 5.1: Machine translation for the multilingual Web (page 28) states:

“The actions falling under this objective should where appropriate support and liaise with actions established under the Digital Libraries theme and/or the Public Sector Information theme, in order to promote the development of an open infrastructure for cross-lingual access to information.”

Section 3.6of the report titled THEME 6: PUBLIC SECTOR INFORMATION states:

“Introduction

Public organisations produce, collect and store vast amounts of public sector information (PSI). The Commission aims to support actions that maximise the re-use of PSI in Europe and unlock its full economic potential and support the Commission policy on PSI. Particularly relevant in this context are the Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 November 2003 on the re-use of PSI24 as well as the INSPIRE initiative (INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe25) which aims at making available relevant, harmonised and quality geographic information for the purpose of formulating, implementing, monitoring and evaluating Community policy-making. Total funding available for this theme is 9.5 M€ and it is intended to fund actions under the two objectives listed below.

Objective 6.1: Legal aspects of Public Sector InformationFunding instrument: TN - It is intended to support one Thematic Network

Focus and outcomes

The aim is to identify and discuss legal barriers to access to and reuse of PSI in the digital environment and suggest ways to overcome them. In 2009 one Thematic Network of legal experts will be supported to analyse the legal challenges and opportunities of PSI in a broad sense (following the OECD approach covering the sectors subject to the Public Sector Information Directive as well as the educational, scientific and cultural sectors)26 as well as related areas (including topics such as orphan works, out of print works and access to and use of public domain material held by public sector organisations).

Conditions and characteristics

• The network should involve legal experts from a majority of European Economic Area countries.
• Experts should have thorough knowledge of the situation concerning PSI in their country and at European level. They should build on existing knowledge about and experience with public sector information, such as the recent OECD work on public sector information and content and the results of projects such as ePSInet.
• The coordinator should have solid experience in the field of PSI as well as the capability of organising coordination activities (meetings, workshops etc) at the European level.

Expected impact

- Identification of legal barriers to access to and reuse of PSI and suggestions for ways to overcome them.

Objective 6.2: Geographic InformationFunding instrument: Pilot Type B -It is intended to support several pilot actions

Focus and outcomesThe aim is to foster the wider use of spatial data by public and private sector organisations and citizens in line with the Directive on the re-use of public sector information and to contribute to the INSPIRE initiative and other relevant policy initiatives.

To this effect Pilot B actions will be supported. These will contribute to increasing the use and reuse of harmonized and interoperable data sets related to one or more of the specific themes enumerated in annexes I-III of the INSPIRE directive through network services for sharing spatial data between public authorities and other stakeholders in the Community enabling the creation of value added services.

Conditions and characteristics

• Proposals should demonstrate their added value compared to projects already funded by the eContentplus programme in the area of Geographic information.
• Proposals should support enabling services such as the visualisation of information layers, overlay of information from different sources, spatial and temporal analysis, etc and the implementation and exploitation of harmonized geographical data sets for improved access and reuse.
• The implemented solutions should result in datasets that are easily accessible and reusable through the use of appropriate standards.
• The multilingual aspects of accessing, exploiting, using, and re-using the underlying content should be an integral part of the proposed implementation activities, where relevant.
• The quality and quantity of the digital content contributed to the project, as well as the criteria for its selection, must be clearly identified
• Proposers should demonstrate that the content constitutes the critical mass necessary to make a significant impact in terms of increasing access and use on a large number of users in the largest possible number of EU countries.
• The consortium and its members must ensure the necessary availability of the content to be contributed to the project. The input content must not depend on proprietary thirdparty rights or any other constraints, which would limit its use for the execution of the project.
• The consortium must agree on the necessary licensing or clearing arrangements for any Intellectual Property Rights arising from the project to ensure wide use and dissemination of the project output.”

The ICT Policy Support Programme (or ICT PSP) aims at stimulating innovation and competitiveness through the wider uptake and best use of ICT by citizens, governments and businesses.

The ePSIplus Thematic network encourages ALL public sector information stakeholders to take advantage of the 2009 CIP call.