Daniele Rizzi is the principal administrator and policy officer at the European Commission. His presentation at the ODSE overviewed the European legislative support on data, with attention to open data.

Mark Vella Muskat is the project officer at European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA). In this talk, he showed examples of Public Open Data projects supported by the European Commission.

Codrina Ilie is a remote sensing/GIS specialist at Terrasigna (RO), and PhD student at the Groundwater Engineering Research Centre, Technical University of Civil Engineering, Bucharest.

In this talk, Codrina explored the state-of-the-art of the Free and Open Source paradigm in the geospatial world. With numerous, stable and powerful solutions, services, libraries built and maintained in the spirit of FOSS, the Open movement has long overcome the status of a garage hobby, infiltrating all sectors. There are hundreds of relevant events around the world each year, from conferences to hackathons, workshops and seminars, studies and reports analysing open source business models, funding schemas and explicit requests for projects that build software to make it open source. In this agile context, it is difficult, if not impossible to keep up to the speedy developments, to make use of what is already out there and investing resources in improving and not building from scratch.

Maria Antonia Brovelli, Professor of GIS and Copernicus Uptake at the Politecnico di Milano (PoliMI), introduced the United Nations Open GIS Initiative, an ongoing Partnership Initiative led by the United Nations Geospatial Operations. The Initiative, established in March 2016, is supported by several UN Agencies and mission partners (Member States, technology contributing countries, international organizations, academia, NGOs, and the private sector) and takes full advantage of their expertise.
Maria illustrated the UN position toward data openness, touching various components of the initiative (Working Groups and Pilot Projects), and presented outcomes and results, as well as lessons learned and future developments.

Freja Vamborg, Senior researcher at Copernicus Climate Change Service, illustrated the European State of the Climate report: this annual report on behalf of the European Commission provides an analysis of the monitoring for Europe for the past calendar year, with descriptions of climate conditions and events.

Sarah Cheesbrough, Earth Observation Specialist at
Satellite Applications Catapult Ltd, UK, spoke about the EO Data Cube based in the South Pacific region (Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu) as part of the IPP CommonSensing project, funded by the UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Programme (https://www.commonsensing.org.uk/

Raymond Sluiter, Senior Advisor Data & Applications at Netherlands Space Office (NSO) discussed an overview and outlook of the EU Copernicus programme around Open European Earth Observation Data.