The cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI) are essential for the well-being and competitiveness of Europeans, but the way they are structured, they are often invisible in statistics. Our data observatory aims to be a permanent and reliable data source for socio-economic and socio-legal research and evidence based policy making.
Because most of the European cultural businesses fall into the microenterprise category, their simplified tax returns, financial statements, and statistical reporting provides too little hard data about the way they work, create value, innovate, or apply law.
While official data is hard to find about the CCSI, legally open and digital data is abundant but scattered. Our data observatory aims to be a permanent point of registration and collection of existing big data sources. We are accessing governmental and scientific data sources, which are legally open for re-use, but where data needs to be reprocessed for new scientific, policy or business uses. We also aim to achieve synergies by pooling research capacities and data. We particularly focus on economic, intellectual property and metadata type data.
Data observatories are permanent registration points for information. The automated data observatory concept of IViR and Reprex, an innovative Dutch start-up, is inspired by open-source scientific software and open data design. It automates data collection, documentation, metadata creation, and data integration procedures, and aims to achieve better data quality, and quicker ecosystem growth than existing EU, OECD, or UNESCO observatories.
We follow the concept of open collaboration, which allows the cooperation with IViR on the level of research institutes, universities as well as cultural organizations, microenterprises and even citizen scientists. We encourage individual researchers and organizations to help curating and validating or data, use or data, and bring in more data for a fuller picture.
IViR and Reprex strive to develop a model for transparent, reproducible socio-economic and socio-legal research that encourages data sharing and reuse with its collaborative governance. The CCSI Data Observatory is based on the Digital Music Observatory prototype, which was validated in the Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Validation Lab and the JUMP European Music Market Accelerator, and our aim is to provide a 21st century path for observatories that fully comply with the best practices of open science and open policy analysis.
- We place all authoritative copies of data on the open Zenodo repository. Individual can suggest new datasets here.
- We are placing the datasets and their descriptive and administrative metadata in an open API.
IViR and Reprex aim first to use the observatory within the RECREO consortium. Please contact Daniel Antal, research associate at d.antal [at] uva.nl for further information.