PSI Alliance holds fourth annual conference in Brussels.

Attendees at the PSI Alliance’s successful fourth annual conference in Brussels this week were delighted to hear that the Commission has listened to the private sector’s view and is minded to revise the PSI Directive. Opening speaker, Grazyna Piesiewicz-Stepniewska, author of the Commission report on PSI, made it clear that it is highly likely that there will be a revision and invited the PSI Alliance conference to give their views on what should be included.

The conference focussed what the key drivers for economic growth in Europe in PSI are. The conference learnt about the economic impact of PSI, how to access the data, how to best put the data on the online, innovative examples of re-use and future trends of what data will be published.

High-level speakers came from private enterprise, government, local authorities and academia. Meanwhile, the Spanish National Geographic Institute was the inaugural winner of the PSI Alliance 5 star competition for excellence in data provision, with an honourable mention going to the Vienna Open Data Portal.

Free and open discussion continued over the course of the rest of the day about what a revised directive should contain and how it should be revised. The conference also gave insight into the direction of the PSI industry, novel examples of PSI re-use and the value of PSI to the economy as a whole – in some ways an impossible question, as speaker Graham Vickery succinctly put – “asking what PSI is worth to the economy is like asking the value of the internet”.

Speakers included:

• Rolf Nordqvist, PSI Alliance Chairman
• Grazyna Piesiewicz-Stepniewska, Access to Information, European Commission
• Alberto Ortiz de Zárate, Director of Citizen Attention, Basque Government
• Ton Zilstra, Community Steward, ePSI Platform
• Graham Vickery, Information Economics
• Denis Berthault, Director, Lexis Nexis
• Kees Keuzenkamp, Director information policy, Netherlands Ministry of the Interior
• Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist, Google

Copies of the presentations of the speakers are available by clicking here.