Adopted unanimously by the CoR plenary today, the opinion of Anne Karjalainen, Member of Kerava City Council (PES/Finland) considers the Commission initiatives on the European Cloud and on ICT standardisation priorities to be instrumental to reducing obstacles to knowledge-sharing and therefore, to boosting the competitiveness of European businesses while also benefiting local and regional authorities.
The rapporteur welcomes the Commission's phased approach with regard to the roll-out of European cloud services, which will enable first the scientific community, and then both businesses and local and regional authorities, to use shared knowledge.
"All relevant players at local, regional and national level must be empowered to promote and fully benefit from open science cloud services because otherwise, differences between Member States risk increasing rapidly, with disastrous effects upon the activity of local and regional authorities", pointed out Anne Karjalainen, reminding also the need to ensure connectivity across the EU and reiterating the CoR's call for call for projects for the development of broadband to be recognised as services of general economic interest.
The opinion underlines that the lack of interoperability in many different sectors is a serious obstacle to data sharing and it is mainly caused by the lack of a standardised data architecture. To this effect, it welcomes the Commission's intention to update the European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services, in the hope that the potential of the internet of things will also be taken into consideration. "The way local and regional authorities deliver public services in Europe will be greatly affected by interoperability and data sharing, this is why these authorities will need to acquire the necessary know-how and get informed of existing good practices", concluded the rapporteur.
