Open Data has emerged as a strong asset for transparency and citizen empowerment, but also, as a business opportunity to create commercial value. We present 3 Open Data businesses supported by the Open Data Incubator for Europe program: OpenLaws, a legal compliance solution for businesses to manage their personalized legal portfolio and automate monitoring processes, thereby reducing costs, balance sheet risks and the risk of personal liability for directors and officers; The IoT Living Lab, that provides the infrastructure to generate actionable open data with large scale public Beacon and LoRaWAN enabled sense network installations and developer friendly platforms, in order to accelerate emerging internet of things (IoT) innovations for smart city and smart citizen solutions, thus, stimulating the creation of new start-ups and next generation IoT applications; and UNICS, a platform for the integration of open data and proprietary repositories about Higher Education & Research in Europe to enable university’s boards and policy makers to inform decisions through a customized dashboard that allows the query, visualization and analysis of the available data.

Elena Simperl

Dr. Elena Simperl is Associate Professor in the Web Science and Internet Group at the University of Southampton. Her research interestsinclude social computing, knowledge driven technologies, and open data. She has contributed and led over 15 national and European research projects and authored more than 75 scientific publications, and chaired the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) in 2011 and 2012 and the European Data Forum (EDF) in 2013. Elena leads the Open Data Incubator for Europe (ODINE), which helps businesses using open data She is vice-president of STI International, director of the ESWC summer school, the Asian Semantic Web School, and the IEEE Summer School on Semantic Computing, and technical director of the European Data Science Academy. She is the founder of semsphere GmbH, a professional training company in the area of semantic technologies, andco-editor-in-chief of the newly launched Journal of Human Computation.