What the world is saying
Helge Sanders
Former Danish Minister of Science
“My ambition is that we now only communicate using
open standards. We must not make this decision on
purely symbolic arguments and principles. It must be a
practical decision.”
Peter Strickx
Director-General Architecture & Standards (CTO) at FEDICT,
Government of Belgium
“Increasingly, we are seeing e-mail and electronic
documents being used in communication between
citizens and the government and between companies
and the government. "To avoid becoming dependent
on any particular supplier, we are moving towards
open standards.”
Common understanding on the use of open
standards for software in the public sector
Danish Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation
“Regarding the use of open standards in the public
sector, the Liberal Party, The Social Democratic Party,
The Danish People’s Party, The Socialist People’s
Party, The Conservatives, The Social Liberals and The
Unity List, in agreement with Liberal Alliance have
concluded the following: 1. Under parliamentary
resolution B103 (session 2005/06) the government
must ensure that public use of information technology,
including use of software is based on open standards.
The requirement for use of open standards applies to
procurement of new software and major updates and
should be cost-neutral as described in the existing
criteria for the public sector.”
Action Plan from the Ministry of Economic Affairs
Netherlands
“Open standards are necessary to achieve
interoperability and supplier-independence.”
Visby Declaration
European Union Swedish Presidency
“Open platforms for innovation and the development of
services for public and commercial use should be
fostered. This should include commercially neutral
promotion of open solutions in public procurement to
ensure that interoperability rests on a non-proprietary
basis. In this context, standardised interfaces between
process steps are one key element.
Esquema Nacional de Interoperabilidad
Spain
“Los documentos y servicios de administración
electrónica que los órganos o Entidades de Derecho
Público emisores pongan a disposición de los
ciudadanos o de otras Administraciones públicas se
encontrarán, como mínimo, disponibles mediante
estándares abiertos.”
SirTim Berners Lee
Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Inventor of HTTP and HTML
“Technical standards that are open and royalty-free allow
people to create applications without anyone’s permission or
having to pay. Patents, and Web services that do not use the
common URIs for addresses, limit innovation.”
“Open standards also foster serendipitous creation: someone
may use them in ways no one imagined. We discover that on
the Web every day. In contrast, not using open standards
creates closed worlds.”
Neelie Kroes
European Commissioner for Digital Agenda
“When
open alternatives are available, no citizen or company
should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company’s
technology to access government information.”
“No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to
choose a closed technology over an open one, through a
government having made that choice first.”
Heidi Grande Røys
Former Norwegian Minister of Government Administration and Reform
"This decision means that the users are granted a right to
watch or download multi-media material from the state in
open format; that is, formats not locked to specific suppliers in
the market"
Lourdes Muñoz
Spanish deputy for the Socialist PSOE
“Los estándares abiertos son más económicos y no obligan al
ciudadano a usar una marca determinada.”
ESOP arises from the common will of its founding
associates. With view to the encouragement and
growth of the Open Source solution market in
Portugal, ESOP serves as platform for the
promotion of opportunities and synergies within
the market, as well as among its associates and
partners.
Established by leading companies and based
upon highly driven individuals, ESOP brings
together a vast array of skills and has on offer a
large variety of professional services. From SMEs
to major organizations, from associations to the
Public
Administration,
from
servers
to
workstations, ESOP points out reliable and lasting
solutions in IT.
Guided by solid principles of competitiveness,
ESOP stands for and actively promotes Open
Source Software, Interoperability, Open Standards
and Platform Independence.
Contact:
[email protected]
http://www.esop.pt
Normas Abertas / Open Standards
Com a crescente desmaterialização de serviços na administração pública, a interoperabilidade e preservação de documentos digitais são hoje elementos fundamentais na administração
dos sistemas informáticos do Estado e de serviços públicos. Estes objectivos só podem ser
atingidos se os documentos digitais obedecerem a normas abertas bem estabelecidas e suportadas de forma consistente por diferentes fabricantes de software.
Assim, a adopção de normas abertas é condição indispensável à independência do Estado
face aos fabricantes, à garantia de total compatibilidade entre serviços e à preservação e
segurança da informação registada, tanto no que se refere à integridade dos conteúdos, como
no que se refere à sua manutenção a longo prazo de forma independente de marcas, formatos
e serviços proprietários.
Instituto Superior Técnico, 3 de Dezembro de 2010
Fernando Henrique Mira da Silva
(Presidente do Centro de Informática do Instituto Superior Técnico)
Digitally signed by FERNANDO HENRIQUE CORTE REAL MIRA DA
SILVA
DN: c=PT, o=Cartão de Cidadão, ou=Assinatura Qualificada do
Cidadão, ou=Cidadão Português, sn=CORTE REAL MIRA DA SILVA,
givenName=FERNANDO HENRIQUE, serialNumber=BI050327305,
cn=FERNANDO HENRIQUE CORTE REAL MIRA DA SILVA
Date: 2010.12.03 18:27:17 Z
UNIVERSIDADE DE ÉVORA
ESCOLA DE CIÊNCIAS E TECNOLOGIA
CENTRO DE INVESTIGAÇÃO EM
TECNOLOGIAS DE INFORMAÇÃO
DECLARAÇÃO
O Centro de Investigação em Tecnologias de Informação (CTI) vem manifestar todo o seu apoio à
iniciativa parlamentar conducente à adoção de normas abertas nos Sistemas Informáticos do Estado
(Projeto de Lei N.º 421/XI).
Trata-se de um conjunto de medidas há muito necessário, que corresponde a garantir aspetos
fundamentais que tanto têm sido descurados na utilização das tecnologias de informação pelo
Estado Português, nomeadamente no que diz respeito a formatos de ficheiros e documentos.
Refiram-se os seguintes aspetos que reputamos de essenciais:
•
termina-se a situação intolerável de ter informação da Administração Pública em formatos
fechados, detidos e controlados por empresas privadas
•
em áreas sensíveis e estratégicas como a Defesa, Justiça, Saúde, etc, corrige-se em
consequência uma problemática com incidência na soberania nacional
•
é garantia da preservação e auditoria real de dados, faceta crucial em documentos do Estado
•
garante-se o exercício da liberdade de escolha, por parte das várias instituições da
Administração, de produtos e ferramentas de diferentes fornecedores
•
promove-se, em termos de mercado, a saudável competição entre produtores de soluções e
serviços informáticos
•
cessa a promoção indireta e reprovável de “monopólios de facto”, suportados na aceitação
de formatos proprietários
•
garante-se a condição base de uma desejada e essencial interoperabilidade entre os sistemas
de informação da Administração Pública
Évora, 02 de dezembro de 2010
Luís Arriaga da Cunha
Professor Catedrático Convidado da UE
Diretor do CITI/UE
1/1
Sobre a adopção de Normas Abertas em Portugal
A necessidade de normas informáticas abertas no que diz respeito ao formato dos documentos e da informação
que circula é uma questão crítica para a sociedade, as liberdades, e a transparência e eficiência do Estado.
Basta para isso tentar imaginar o que seria a WEB caso as normas que regulam o formato dos documentos e
aplicações oferecidos pelos diferentes sites do mundo inteiro estivessem na mão de uma ou mais entidades
privadas que, ao serviço dos seus objectivos comerciais, mudassem periodicamente a definição das mesmas.
Não só a WEB tal como a conhecemos não existiria, como a mesma estaria fragmentada em diferentes
domínios (por países, culturas e regiões de influência política e económica distintas, ...). Para além disso, as
forças económicas e políticas que dominassem essas normas e os programas que as implementassem,
estariam na posição de exercer uma política de preços ditada pela ausência de concorrência real e efectiva. Tal
também seria capaz de aumentar a info-exclusão pelo preço desmesurado que custariam os programas que
permitiriam aceder e produzir a informação e diminuiria a eficácia da utilização da WEB pelo Estado, ao serviço
dos cidadãos.
Assim, é fundamental dispor de normas públicas, estabelecidas por consórcios públicos com a participação dos
privados, como é o caso no que diz respeito à WEB actualmente, para garantir que não existem forças capazes
de condicionarem a forma como a informação circula e de aumentarem artificialmente as suas margens de lucro
à custa do controlo dessas normas.
É público e reconhecido que a Microsoft é proprietária das normas de padronização dos formatos intermédios
dos ficheiros da suite de produtos MSOffice, mudando as versões dos mesmos à medida das suas
conveniências. Só isso pode justificar o preço exagerado e injustificado que cobra pelos seus programas: Word,
Office, Power Point, etc.
Neste sentido, seria muito desejável que fosse possível combater esse domínio através da adopção de
formatos normalizados para codificação dos ficheiros de documentos, abrindo assim um mercado mais normal
para os programas de criação e manipulação dos mesmos, em que diferentes actores estariam em condições
de produzir programas, uns melhores, outros piores, capazes de manipularem os documentos, dada a
estabilidade da definição dos seus formatos internos. A recusa em adoptar os formatos específicos usados pela
suite MSOffice concorreria, a prazo, para que tais programas passassem a ter preços mais razoáveis e os
cidadãos e os Estados não estivessem tão dependentes da vontade de uma empresa.
Também, a adopção de políticas mais abertas no que diz respeito aos sistemas de operação utilizados,
contribuiria para um mercado mais equilibrado, quebrando a situação em que um dos protagonistas tem uma
posição dominante e cobra preços que estão longe do valor real dos seus produtos. Basta analisar as suas
margens de lucro para verificar quanto essa situação é artificial.
Sistemas de operação seguros, suficientes para as necessidades de trabalho dos utilizadores convencionais,
sem necessidades especiais, deveriam não custar mais do que algumas poucas dezenas de Euros e o preço a
pagar de forma periódica pela licença de utilização deveria ser proporcional ao serviço prestado e não ser o
resultado de uma posição dominante artificial. Isto é, o software convencional (sistema de operação e
programas de processamento de texto, folhas de cálculo, apresentações, etc.) deveriam, quando vendidos em
grandes números, ter um custo proporcional ao serviço prestado às organizações e aos indivíduos, e não
artificialmente elevado como actualmente, pelo menos para uma marca específica deles.
As empresas que não pratiquem esta política deveriam ser preteridas e não acarinhadas / engordadas. É claro
que não se trata de um desafio simples: exige ir contra a corrente e a facilidade e realizar todo o trabalho de
teste, planeamento e implementação que crie as condições para abandonar a situação actual. Numa primeira
fase não permitiria provavelmente diminuir os custos no imediato, só a médio e longo prazo tal se verificaria na
minha opinião.
José Legatheaux Martins
Professor Catedrático de Sistemas Distribuídos e Redes de Computadores do Departamento de Informática da
FCT/UNL
Subdirector da FCT/UNL
Sobre a Adopção de Normas Abertas nos Sistemas de Informação do Estado
Posição de Princípio
Uma norma é considerada 'aberta' quando é publicamente conhecida e passível de ser utilizada por qualquer cidadão e entidades privadas ou públicas sem necessidade de pagamento ou qualquer outro tipo de restrição. Existindo qualquer condicionante a estes princípios básicos, uma norma é considerada 'fechada', o que ocorre habitualmente com normas detidas ou controladas por empresas privadas.
Compete ao Estado proteger de forma eficaz e duradoura o acesso aberto e livre a normas que envolvam qualquer tipo de recursos públicos, nomeadamente documentos, processos e sistemas de informção. A violação destes princípios, para além de minar o poder do Estado e os próprios princípios Democráticos, conduz a elevados e desnecessários custos financeiros para os cidadãos.
Por estes motivos manifesto expressamente a minha opinião de que a Assembleia da República, enquanto fórum primeiro da representação Democrática, deverá defender intransigentemente a adopção de normas abertas no estado, em particular no que toca aos seus sistemas de informação. Mário Zenha­Rela, PhD
Professor Auxiliar da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal
Professor Associado Adjunto da Universidade de Carnegie­Mellon, USA Cidadão Português, CC nº 7112986
Tim Berners-Lee on eGovernment video for
Ministerial eGovernment Conference 2007
Source
http://www.w3.org/2007/09/21-timbl-egov
Background
Tim Berners-Lee recorded a video keynote for the 4th Ministerial Conference that took place in Lisbon
on 19-21 September 2007. The video length is 15 minutes.
•
•
small size video
large size video
The video is encoded is Ogg Theora format. If you have problems watching it, we have some help
available. The conference organizers also made the video available at YouTube. There is also a set of
accompanying slides that was used as a summary of the video content by José M. Alonso to complement
the keynote at the conference.
Transcript
Ladies and gentleman, let me add my welcome to the conference. I'm sorry I can't be with you in person.
I have a few minutes now of thoughts for you at this eGovernment workshop to talk about things that are
most important for the next phase of eGovernment and the interactions of governments and governments
and people intermediated by the World Wide Web.
I'm gonna talk about making data available, about openness, and also a little bit about transparency in the
sense of governments making clear to people how they're using data appropriately. There are some slides
that are on the Web, they're maybe in your handouts, I'll go through them very rapidly, if it weren't for the
slides, I could talk to you for 45 minutes and we don't have enough time for that.
So let me talk first about openness. So why openness, what it means for a government. An important
thing to remember when you're being open, firstly I think, government departaments have an obligation
to make the data available to the public at large, NGOs, other governments; unless there are really good
reasons for keeping that information confidential, then it should be put out, and now we have standards
for putting data on the Web, we have standards for putting documents on the Web, I think both documents
and data should be put out there using standards.
Why standards? Well, it's fair for a range of reasons, if you put them in a proprietary format then
some people will be able to read them and some won't, you're also forcing people to buy a
particular software, which I don't think it's the role of government, but also very importantly, when
you put things out using standards, when you put information there in HTML, using a standard, when you
put data out there in RDF, then you can be more sure that the archives will be redable by posterity. People
studying from other countries, and other times, will be able to understand the information.
So the idea of opennes is to maximize reuse. I'd just like to reflect a little on what reuse of information
means. If you think about the Web, the value that the Web adds to information is unexpected reuse. When
something is put on the Web, and maybe is put on because one person asks for it, but it's often reused by
other people in ways unimagined by the person who first asked for the information. Similarly, when
you're looking for things on the Web, you find things which you never expected to find. That is the
power. We do that at the moment with documents and we should do it also with data.
Who can reuse this? When you put information from your government department on the Web, it may be
reused by the public clearly; by your collegaues as well, it may be that there are people within the same
department who actually haven't found access to your data otherwise; but also in other agencies, very
importantly, we don't want government department to be stove pipes of information, we want it to be
used by people in other agencies both in your country and other countries. Very often you can only get a
real view of what is happening in the World by combining data across many different software
application fields and many different countries.
It's also obviously important for companies you're doing business with, for people that you award grants
to, you should be able to put out the data of what grants available and so on, your partners up and down
the supply chain in general. It's also important for research because as you, for example, put out the data
about unammended roads in your county or whatever it is, somebody somewhere else can be correlating
how that changes with time with other factors and learning, so research is always interested in taking a
different look at this data.
It can be used by executive management, the very high level, Ministerial level, when you want to make a
decision, it's very important, sometimes in a hurry, that a Minister has access to, can ask a question which
needs a view of data across of, perhaps, many agencies, to be able to answer that question. If the data has
all been provided in a standard format, one can rapidly perform that query, get the result back, produce a
graph, whatever it is, can base the esence of the situation quickly, particularly interesting and important to
think ahead about data availability for emergencies. When emergency occurs you don't know, by
definition, what information you're gonna need. When planes hitted the twin towers, nobody had that
problem before, they needed access to lots of different information to combine together and it would be
very much easier if that information would be available in a standard format. So, if you like, it's the art of
planning for the unexpected.
It's very important when you this to use the standards. The current standards, the Semantic Web
standards, which are RDF, OWL and SPARQL (the query language), are different in a few technical
fundamental ways, now trying to get across the esence of one of these which impact the way that
government departments work together. In the past, before the Semantic Web standards, you had to
choose. If someone was putting some information out there on the Web or securating it in some form,
they had to choose whether to use an ISO standard, whether to use a national standard, whether to use a
local standard that had been produced pehaps by town or been invented for a particular project. That is a
difficult decision to make; because ISO standards are very hard to make, they take a long time, because
you have to get a lot of people to agree, and they only typically exist for few concepts. Meanwhile, local
standards like termns that have to define, so to say, holes on the road that need to be fixed, may only be
defined by local town so they're not so reusable.
The Semantic Web allows you to send data or put data on the Web using a mixture of terms. So when
something involves the time or a date or latitudes and longitudes, then you can use terms which will be
recognized by software in many different applications across the World. When you use terms like the
category of pothole in a road, then it's maybe something that is local only to a particular area, but when
information about a particular change goes out, it will have mixed data. Some of the details of the pothole
data may be only understandable by the local town, but some other thing, like the fact that the event
happened in a particular time, date or place would be understandable by anybody, anybody will be able to
put in on a map or a timescale, in between there can be national standards. So in fact, it turns out that
when you send data across the net, data is sent in a mixture, and the Semantic Web tehcnology allos you
to go out in a mixture of languages if you like, so every line in the form goes out and is written in a
different language; some languages very well known, some less well known, and that is sort of magic
about the Semantic Web technology, that allows you to go around that problem if you like without to
having to make a one big choice of whether you have to use a given standard or not, it allows you to use a
mixture, and puts a constant pressure for the development of terms that are more wildly shared.
Understading that, I think it's important because you have to be able to push back on people who say that
"it's too difficult" or "there's no standard" or "we don't want to use standards technology because we don't
have terms, there aren't terms out there for everything we need", and you can push back and say "well,
use the terms that are out there and exist, and when they don't exist, don't use them."
So the Semantic Web, in a sense, is a technology which allows this balance between the how many of
common languages and the diversity of too many languages to be in a better balance. When you put data
on the Semantic Web, in fact you will be giving identifiers, URIs, things of storage, HTTP, all kinds of
things, to portals, to people, to government departments, people who have a public face, certainly to
roles, to organizations, to projects. If a thing is useful for a government you can give a identifier to it, a
URI, in a given department, give it that URI. A very important concept is that of linked data, that is when
date that is published by one department and it will use the URIs for things which are under the control of
another department it will use those URIs. So somebody who is picking the information of department A
will be able to automatically pull in the relevant backing information about this object which is defined
by department B. We call that linked data, and the linked data is starting to take off now on the Semantic
Web.
So basically the rules about putting data on the Web are very similar to the rules about putting
information on the Web in general. Use standards. Use URIs to identify things. Now we're doing to put
information about objects and projects, and things we want to be able to process. People across the World
may want to pull into there, processing systems pull into spreadsheets, put onto maps and so on. Use
URIs, same old rules in fact we had for the Web.
So I've told briefly about the importance of openness, perhaps some of you, when I said "oh, use URI for
person" well, to some extent if someone has a public role it's reasonable for them to have an identifier so
people can find things that they've said, things that they've written, how you can contact them. Obviously
a few people mattered about "oh, wait a moment, we're identifying people, what about privacy?". Privacy,
of course, is very important, and is one of the areas where we have to be careful because of misuse of
information. There are lots of types of misuse of information. It might be breaking copyright, it may be
using information I picked up as a personal listener; if I put something on my iPod and I use it here to
entertain you all on the public address system, in fact I'd be breaking the rules because I got it for my
private enjoyment and I'm not supposed to use it for entertaining a hall full of people. There are ways in
which we get information for one parrticular use and in fact we are constrained by society, by laws, by
ethics, by regulations into the way we use it, perhaps, many many things, not only what we think of
naturally is privacy as a category, think of it as appropriate use.
One way of looking at trying to prevent people misusing data is to prevent them getting it but, of course,
in the iPod example I need that data for my personal listening, I have to use my own discretion,
understand that I have a constraint and I don't then use it to power a concert of several thousand people.
So access control for that wouldn't work, and it turns out that for many things in government as well,
government agencies have access to all kinds of data which they've got maybe for the purposes of counter
terrorism or crime prevention, and they have access to that for that purpose and not for other purposes or
maybe for pursuing some particularly bad source of crime but not for pursuing people who forgot to
renew the library books. So what's more important and much more practical than trying to limit access to
the most secret and very sensitive information is, in general, for inmformation around, governments, I
think, tracking, building systems which track where the data came from, tracking what we call the
provenance of the data. So the provenance of the data is its source, but more importantly is the things
associated with the source and how I got it, in effect, how can I use it, maybe licensing information,
whether it's released with a Creative Commons license for example that is commonly on the net; I can put
something out there and state that this can be used for any non-commercial activity as long as you put my
name, you associate my name with it, for example. But also is associated with the trustworthy of the
information, so it's very important aspect for me and for anybody I pass the data to be able to explain how
I got it, so if an important decision is eventually going to be made based on analysis made on that data,
then somebody can go back and check and make sure it's based on appropriately sound sources. Of
course, often the data is combined, so maybe I got some data from one source but then I combined it with
something much more sensitive, so we have to be careful that our systems track whether the data has
been polluted from the public data I took it but I added to it and processed and used data that was
available for me for a very specific purpose.
So I feel that we should build systems that are aware of the provenance of data, track the acceptable uses
and that is much more important than trying to do the typical security thing of blocking people's access to
it, in general people will have access to all kinds of data and they have to be responsible and accountable
for how they've used it, so we must build systems which allow to show they've been used in the right
way.
So in conclusion, let me say that governments should be open, they should use standards, this does not
mean changing how existing systems work, it means just attaching standards compliant pieces to existing
systems, and when we build these systems, which will be so powerful, we should be very careful and
make sure they always use data in appropriate fashion. Thank you very much for your attention.