EDITORIAL: TRENDS AND PROSPECTS OF OPENING DATA IN PROBLEM DRIVEN SOCIETIES

In the last two decades open data has revolutionised the data landscape in the European Union. In the beginning of the 21 century government data was typically available at high cost accompanied by restrictive licences that only a few could afford. How different is the data landscape in 2022: in the EU27 thousands of government datasets are provided as open data, including many high value datasets and this may only be the beginning of the next wave of open data foreseen if the European Data Strategy is fully implemented. Europe is working towards this goal with the soon to be expected draft Implementing act on high-value data sets as part of the Open Data Directive, the proposed Data Act, and the proposed Data Governance Act.

In the last two decades open data has revolutionised the data landscape in the European Union. In the beginning of the 21 st century government data was typically available at high cost accompanied by restrictive licences that only a few could afford. How different is the data landscape in 2022: in the EU27 thousands of government datasets are provided as open data, including many high value datasets and this may only be the beginning of the next wave of open data foreseen if the European Data Strategy is fully implemented. Europe is working towards this goal with the soon to be expected draft Implementing act on high-value data sets as part of the Open Data Directive, the proposed Data Act 2 , and the proposed Data Governance Act 3 .
Although the availability of open government data has significantly grown over the past twenty years, the provision is still mostly provider led, leaving even today many users in the dark when they are trying to find, access and reuse open government data for their purposes. As such the supply of open government data is not yet based on the major challenges we have to encounter in our information societies anno 2022. The upcoming Interoperable Europe Act will help the Member States further on their way to digital transformation facilitating the creation of eco-system of integrated digital public services. This Act will be adding to the building blocks upgrading governing digital services in the EU agreed upon earlier this year by the European Commission, European Parliament and European Council: the Digital Services Act 4 and the Digital Markets Act 5 .
Academic research on and with open data so far has been mostly single disciplinary and single domain, providing new insights limited to these disciplines or domains, ignoring the fact that most challenges go beyond these and require interdisciplinary and multi-domain research approaches to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of the challenges and ways to overcome them. The second trend discovered in the submissions for this special issue, applying open data to real world challenges is evident in the following articles: 1. Urban dog spaces: the openness of dog-related data in the City of Zagreb, Croatia by Varga et al. is an assessment of data provided via official websites and portals of the city required for construction and maintenance of urban infrastructure. Five-star system of ranking the data formats was used for the published data and the quality of data was cross-checked with the field survey and citizen science collected data. 2. Importance of the open data approach for multimodal travel improvement by Mandzuka et al. examines Multimodal Journey Planners (MJPs). MJPs provide travellers with better and more complete information when choosing a mode of transport so they can select the most suitable option for their needs. The open data approach is crucial for defining a system that responds to the end-users' actual needs and aspirations. In this research, the importance of traffic data collection, acquisition and distribution according to the open data concept is described. 3. Open election data: Evidence from Croatia in a comparative perspective by Đurman et al. compares the seven major groups of electoral data available for the electoral process in EU27 and the United Kingdom, focusing on the temporal aspect of the timeliness of pre-during and post-election process data as well as providing additional details on the open electoral data available in Croatia. 4. Open access on GNSS permanent networks data in case of disaster by Latinčić et al.
pointed out that although open access to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) permanent networks is highly beneficial for natural disaster management, access is currently often restricted. A high percentage of GNSS permanent network providers that participated in the research presented agreed that these data should be freely available in instances of natural disasters.
The third identified trend: Improving the open data ecosystem, deals with the research not focused on the data sets itself, but rather in the components of the ecosystem required for its effective re-use and value generation: 1. In the article Framework for federated learning open models in e-Government applications, Guberović et al. develop a concept of the Federated Learning Open Model (FLOM) as an example for the third generation e-Government machine learning tool in the cohabitation of ethical computing and intelligent services. The authors apply the proposed FLOM framework to the horizontally partitioned data environment with the example of the agricultural commodity price prediction, as well as the vertically partitioned data environment on the example of the loan approval prediction. 2. In the Serious games for building data capacity, Di Staso et al. recognized the need for the fast awareness raising and the capacity building of the public institution employees and provide an overview and the assessment of twelve available teaching games covering that potential.

Towards digital innovation: Stakeholder interactions in agricultural data ecosystem in
Croatia is an article in which Hrustek et al. analyse the requirements and the potential for data flow in Croatian agriculture data ecosystem, focusing on data supply from this data rich sector. In complex systems such as agriculture is, effective cooperation in promoting of the best management practices and sustainable value creating depends on understanding the myriad of stakeholders operating often in a decentralized data ecosystem. Identifying the stakeholders and their relationships is achieved by superimposing the stakeholder importance with respect to the estimated data supply based on the on-line queries and semi-structured interviews.
Basically, the most important challenge in the research community today is enabling the multiand inter-disciplinary collaboration. The speed of the societal challenge of data empowered development and sustainability achievement in EU27 depends on the three trends identified in the submissions for the "Trends and Prospects of Opening Data in Problem Driven Societies". We can consider the dedicated issues on open data research as the important step in enabling multi-domain and interdisciplinary approach in applying open data to real world challenges through the maturation of open data ecosystems.