How Open Data Revolutionizes Urban Life Big Data is changing life in cities for governments and citizens alike. In a previous episode of 10 Blocks we heard from journalist David Black about how sophisticated data analysis is helping the police to predict where crime is likely to occur. Additionally, we heard from Harvard Business School’s Mike Luca, who helps cities and companies work together using data to create better policies and better customer service experiences.
New funds available for European Public Open Data projectst
he Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) in Telecom is an EU programme to facilitate cross-border interaction between public administrations, businesses and citizens, through the deployment of Digital Service Infrastructures. One of its aims is to support projects which contribute to the European ecosystem of the deployed interoperable and interconnected digital services.
Under this framework, Public Open Data is identified as one of the priorities, for which a budget of €3.5 million has been allocated in 2016 for projects around this topic. The grants covering 50 per cent of costs will help both European public administrations and businesses to make full use of Public Open Data or further develop digital services based on them.
Who is using Open Data in Spain?
The Spanish association ASEDI, Asociación Multisectorial de la Información, regularly releases a report with interesting findings on the (Spanish) companies which are using Open Data. In this report they take a closer look at what is defined as the ‘Infomediary’ sector. Companies in this sector (re-)use public and/or private information to create value-added products or services for third parties or the public sector. For many of these companies, Open Data plays an important role in their business model, making it interesting to get to know more about them.
This new release adds variants from Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, two clinical testing laboratory companies operating primarily in the United States, to the collection previously developed by Inserm through the Universal Mutation Database (UMD) project in France. The BRCA Share™ database now contains over 6,200 total BRCA variants, an increase of nearly 30% compared to the previous Inserm UMD database. Of these variants, 334 are newly identified pathogenic or likely pathogenic, increasing by about 20% the total number of pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants to 1,826.
The data include 375 BRCA gene variants whose role in cancer risk was previously uncertain. Of these, 93% are now classified as neutral or likely neutral, while the remaining 7% are now classified as pathogenic or likely pathogenic. Neutral gene variants are generally considered benign, or non-disease-causing, while pathogenic variants are gene mutations that increase an individual's cancer risk.