The 2nd version of the Engage platform has been released with new and improved features and architecture, making it an intelligent social and collaborative space for researchers, data journalists and citizens, who rely on open public data for professional or personal (re-)use. After the release of the 1st version of the Engage platform in 2012, the worked to release new and improved features and architecture. A key motivation for those changes and additions were the results and feedback of the project’s extensive user engagement and evaluation efforts.
In an effort to make it attractive and user-friendly and to maximize the potential of Open Government Data for the target communities, there has been a thorough makeover of the user interface. Moreover, the core of the Engage platform has been strengthened by switching from a flat-metadata schema to a richer, semantically enhanced meta-data model. The aim is for Engage to seamlessly interoperate with a number of PSI repositories through appropriate transformation engines.
Some of the functionalities are:
- Single Sign On
- Dataset extension / curation graph
- Elastic & filtered dataset search
- Dataset download/upload and simplified meta-data definition
- Data visualisation
- Dataset request from data publishers (e.g. public authorities) and the community
- Display of provenance information
Also, social networking and rating features have been added, such as:
- Formation of end user groups/communities
- Comments and discussions on original or derived datasets
- Approval/disapproval and rating of datasets as a quality indicator
The above features position ENGAGE as a centralized and collaborative PSI e-Infrastructure providing the necessary tools for dataset processing and acquisition and differentiate it from a simple repository of open public datasets. It is an intelligent social and collaborative space for researchers, data journalists, citizens and other potential end users, who rely on open public data for professional or personal (re-)use.
