Okay, great. So, first of all, the framework within which we operate in the Commission, among other things, of course, last year, you may remember in February 2020, the Commission adopted a communication on the European strategy for data, which is actually the sort of

struggle that we are following now to implement supporting activities and to adopt a certain number of legal acts. So we start first from the legal part of these activities.

So the communication included a certain number of legal acts to be adopted in the coming years. And you can see them here. First of all, the Data Governance Act, which I will describe

a bit more later. This was already adopted as a Commission proposal, of course, in November 2020. It is now in the, of course, legal co-decision process, so in the hands of the Parliament and the Council, and we hope to have its final adoption next year.

But the text is already there, at least the proposal the Commission has put on the table, and it contains, I think, a lot of important proposals to regulate or to make the data market more efficient. Then there has been the adoption of the Digital Market Act. I won't say much on this. This was a

legal act which was due since a long time, and it's more interesting how to regulate, for example, the big companies which work on the data market and to regulate a bit their power or try to make it more fair.

Then there is something very close to the Open Data Interest, an implementing act coming from the Open Data Directly. We will spend some time later. And finally, a Data Act, so something which is in a way complemented the Data Governance Act, and

which we are currently working on. There has been recently a public consultation which closed a few days ago. And we are now taking into account the feedback from stakeholders and citizens, and we count to

put again a proposal on the table of the co-legislators by the end of the year. So a few more words on two of these initiatives from the legal point of view. The Data Governance Act, so the text is out there as a proposal.

It consists of basically five chapters. The first one is addressing how public administrations could make available data which are not under the Open Data Directive, so which should not be made available as open data because there are some security or confidential

issues. But nevertheless, public administration would like to make them available to a more limited set of users. And this is a chapter which tries to define some generic rules for this in

order to have a sort of more genius approach to this problem at the European level. Then there are a few articles regarding how data intermediaries, so those who act between the data owners and the data re-users, could act again in order to have a certain easier functioning of the data market.

Some articles concern a framework for data altruism, so data that private companies in particular could make available for free, but for the benefit of the society.

So data which normally should not be reused for commercial purposes, but could, for example, be used for research or for improving applications addressing citizens. And then the final component is the proposal to set up a so-called European Data Innovation Board.

So a high-level board composed by member states and European stakeholders to in a way have a sort of supervision of the activities that we want to implement to make the data market better. And there will also be an influence on what I will say later on, on the activities proposed by the Digital Europe Program.

And there is also a final chapter on how to build trust when it comes to international situations, so data exchanges with third countries. Something very concrete on which we are working since a long time and we hope to have it adopted by the end of the year.

Well, you know, certainly, the Open Data Directive, which was adopted in 2019, and I put it here now because the Open Data Directive had two years to be transposed into national legislation. So this deadline expired in July this year.

It was 20 days after the data adoption, June 2019. So we are now receiving the transposition in national legislation from all the 27 member states. We are making an assessment and then we will have some, most probably, some reactions or some feedback to give to member states.

But mostly we find that the transposition, as far as we can say now, has been well received and well made. So this means that from now on the directive

is fully enforced in our end because for a directive what counts is the transposition to national legislation. But the Open Data Directive also contained something that we certainly know, the attribution to the Commission to adopt an implementing Act

to define a certain number of very specific datasets, which should be made available under conditions which are even more interesting than those applicable to, in general, to the Open Data Directive. So in particular, there are some additional obligations having these datasets made available completely for free, because the Open Data Directive has a few exceptions where some marginal costs

should still be charged, but these datasets should be made available fully free. There should be machine readable formats, which means not only PDF, but also formats which can be reused easily and made available, so this is particularly important, by

APIs. That is that this should facilitate or allow the reuse of this data directly through machine to machine application and not only downloading through a sort of human interface on a website, which is still of course very important, but this should improve

further the possibility to reuse these things. So this is something that we are working on. We are bound for the time being to the six domains that you can see there, which are still quite wide, but there are a few of them which are not yet covered, and we can also probably shortly start to think how to extend this list of priority domains.

Now, moving to something which is more on how the data market can be improved and users can have an easy access to data and to open data from the practical point of view, not only the legislative one. First of all,

something which is already existing there, because of course we have not started to work on open data or on data since last year. We have geo-porters, and also a geo-porter exists in some time. We have the geo-porter which is coming from the Inspire directive out there since some time.

And the European data portal which has since a few months is called data.europa.eu. You can see it on the right side of the screen. This is something that we have recently upgraded, merging the data coming from member

states and some other European countries with data coming from the European institutional bodies. So now there is a single entry where you can find basically all open data made available by national open data portals and some regional ones, as well as data coming from the European Commission, Parliament Council and many agencies.

Today or yesterday there were more than 1,200,000 datasets available, all with a single metadata model which allows us to search in an easy way through all countries and the European institutions,

as well as fields which should tell you, for example, which kind of reuse you are allowed to do and so on. It's a portal, but I think it's something which has also developed quite a lot in the past and I invite you to give a look to these last versions.

There is also something which is a bit less known but it's quite interesting and I also put it here because it will be further developed in the future. It's what we call support system for data sharing. It's again a website. Here you find the mostly

information and support on how to share data, not only open data but also data coming from the private sector. You can see there in that orange menu, a lot of points that you can find there. It's already quite filled in with documentation.

You find a lot of documents or reports which explain to you, for example, how to implement a good API, how to make APIs safer, taking into account server security reasons or necessities and so on.

This is more on the technical aspect. There is also something concerning the legal aspects. For example, again, I'm thinking the two APIs, how to set up with a sort of, let's say, semi-automatic way, a sort of license which

can accompany an API to specify, legally speaking, what is allowed to do with those data and what is not. Now I move to the future. In a way, I think long awaited the Digital Europe program which is in the pipeline system time.

It is finally on its last mile. We think it should be adopted by the end of this month or beginning of October after a certain number of steps including public consultations, of course.

It is a program which basically tries to put together, even if it is not the only program of course supporting digital, but it is the combination of programs which in the past were a bit, let's say, distributed.

For example, what you know very well, the Connecting World Facility program, the ISA Square and so on. Now we try to put most of these activities in a single package which is quite complex still. It is arranged around basically five components that you can see there in yellow.

I will drill down a bit more. Of course, I have no time, not all the competencies necessary to develop anything on cyber security, on IEC, but I will develop a bit more on what we are going to do with data.

So this is already a snapshot, a bit more detailed, even if it looks complicated, but you can give it a look later. On a specific one of the five chapters of Digital Europe Forum, which is the one mostly addressing data.

You can already see some components which are quite crucial for us. First of all, those domains that you can see there, manufacturing, green deal, mobility, etc. These are the first priority domains which have been already defined in the data strategy communication.

Around which we would like to build the so-called data spaces. I will describe a bit more what we mean with data spaces. Those are the domains that we start to address, at least in the first two years of the work program. These are complemented or you have the horizontal components.

You have the digital twins, supporting ways of creating digital clones of some parts of the reality. You have the high value data sets, which are horizontal contributions to these domain-related data spaces.

Detesting facilities, which should create a platform where you can test and you can experiment with data. There is a component. This is the component mostly on data. On the lower part of the screen, you can see the component which is more supported in infrastructure.

Of course, we have a component which is basically the content, the data, the software, the artificial intelligence component. We also need something to have all this work and this component is in the lower part. There is also in the digital euro program a huge support for

financing the setting up of a European cloud infrastructure and high performance computing. All this should create a sort of global framework where at the same time we have the computing capability, the cloud where you can store securely data in Europe and the content which is data.

What are the European data spaces? It's basically virtual environment. It's not databases or places where data are stored.

It is also, of course, storage capabilities, but it is for the condition which should allow for a specific domain to exchange data easily. Having, for example, rules or recommendations for technical and legal standards to make this data available, a platform where this data could be exchanged and so on.

We started thinking that we need first to think in terms of domain. We cannot think that from day zero we can have a unique data space at the European level where any kind of data from any domain can be exchanged easily.

It would be ideal, but of course impossible in the reality. So we started to gradually go to maybe one day where we have just one single market where any kind of data can be exchanged. We start with creating or supporting specific domain data spaces.

Then, little by little, in Europe it took decades to get to a functioning market for goods. The final scope is to have one single European data space.

For the time being, we start with domain-related ones. These are some key characteristics of the data space. It must be an infrastructure, of course, but a data governance mechanism. How this data can be exchanged, both from the legal and non-legal, let's say from the soft law or recommendations.

Allowing the data holders to stay in control of the data that they made available for free or under payment. Having clarity from the re-user side on what they can do and what they are not allowed to do with those data.

Having as much as possible the participation of all stakeholders concerned, both from the reuse and from the data production side. As I said several times, we are starting defining domain-related data spaces.

We also think that from the very beginning we need to have a sort of horizontal layer where all these data spaces, even if they concentrate and they start working on their domain, are not starting to diverge too much. Something which tries to keep a certain horizontal level where what can already be shared across domain is already implemented.

This is the role of something which will be quite crucial and critical, not easy, but we think quite an important role.

The support center for data spaces, supported by the Digital Europe Program. This is in a way the evolution of what I showed before, which already exists, which is the support center for data sharing, which is for the time being basically just providing some resources. This will go much beyond. We also have a certain role, not in defining, but in supporting and providing recommendations to the data spaces.

We have a gradual implementation of this in the first couple of years. We start with the first goal of the Digital Europe Program, which we hope to launch soon after the adoption, so in October.

First of all, the creation of network stakeholders and then identifying common requirements for the data spaces and starting to build this sort of horizontal layer in parallel with the creation of the data spaces. This will also be not so easy because ideally we should go in a sort of a sequential order, but this would take too long.

So there will be things which happen more or less in parallel, which is maybe not the most efficient way of implementing a vision, but at the same time, this should allow to have a certain faster implementation, even if sometimes maybe there will be the necessity to fine-tune from time to time this parallel progress of different activities.

There is also a chapter of the Digital Europe Program, which is particularly addressing open data, which is basically specifically addressing what I've shown and already exists now.

On one hand, we will support the continuation of the European data portal, the data.europa.eu, which was funded so far by the connect.europa.eu facility.

We receive funding to continue to support the portal, which is an essential tool to find a single entry point for accessing all the open data made available through the open data directive. And then another important point to in a way support the implementation of the, in this case, of the high-value data sets.

So the high-value data regulation is a regulation, so there is an obligation on member states to do whatever is included and in particular creating APIs, because so far, I think we think that most of the data set which will be included

in the high-value data set regulation are already out there free of charge. So there will be not much change in terms of cost necessary to make available data for free, which are now made available under payment.

But many of those data are not yet available with APIs. You can tell a certain cost. And even if we are not able, we cannot and we don't want to just pay all this cost because this is not the objective of the regulation, but still we want to provide some help.

So there will be grants helping member states, public administration, which have to make available high-value data sets to, for example, implement APIs or even better or even also take the opportunity to harmonize a bit more those data sets

in order to have them harmonized at a certain cross-border level. For example, it would be good to have proposals coming from more than one country addressing not only the creation of API but also the harmonization of a certain set of data sets so that you have a more easy way of reusing those things.

This should be the end of my presentation, just to give an idea of the calendar. So the data act, so the second part of this illegal act, which we should adopt.

We still hope to have an adoption of the proposal by the end of this year or maybe at the latest should be beginning of next year. These will concern essentially B2G and B2B data sharing, so sharing between business and government and between the private sector.

The data governance act, which was adopted as a proposal beginning of this year, we hope to have it adopted at the latest in 2022 and maybe even before. Then we have funding programs. I said I think quite a lot on the Digital Europe, which will be adopted in one month at the latest and then soon after we will have the first course.

What we adopt is the World Program 2021-2022, so we should start immediately after that to think what to do in 2023 and so on. So it's the usual conventional cycle, but the Europe program is not the only one out there.

We have the connecting your facilities, it's still existing, it's F2. It's more addressing now broadband and the physical infrastructure, but it's still existing. Then there is of course Europe for what is more innovation and research.

It's also important to remind the recovery fund, so the huge amount of money which has been now basically agreed with member states. The plans from member states have I think all been adopted or going to be adopted or approved by the Commission.

That's a lot of money which is going to be invested in not only digital of course, but there is around 20% of the recovery fund should be dedicated to digital. That's also quite an important component which we think should complement the funding coming from the other programs.

This was really the end of my presentation. Thank you, Daniela. That was very informative, very excellent overview. I will hit with one question and then we will go to the next speaker. Maybe a bit provocative question. So when you look at, for example, US, Brazil, China, African

Union, what is the things that you as a policymaker or a support policymaker in European Commission, what is the thing that you may be proud of and something that you feel like other continents do better? Well, let's say that what the Commission has been changing its approach and I think it's a good approach now.

While we are also of course giving a look to what happens around us, we still have to take into account that other countries have also a different way of dealing with policies.

The approach that we have in Europe has more constraints in a way. Of course, we all know the GDPR. Since we want to keep the European approach, which is, for example, having a huge protection of personal data,

we need to face the fact that this implies also more difficulties than the similar approaches that can be adopted in the United States or in China and so on. We need to take this into account and we have to pay the price to a certain extent.

So this is why we learn the certain flexibility that certain parties have. We also have a study which I invite you to read which monitors the data economy in Europe but also in certain countries,

in particular in the countries that you mentioned, Brazil, China, the United States and now the UK. And there we can already derive some interesting facts. Please share that study with us. Please share it. You can share it in the chat.

So what I want to say as a conclusion is that we have learned two things. We still want to defend the European values, so not to give up at all on the principle like protecting private data,

which can entail more complicated ways of making valuable data, but we want to do that. And at the same time, we have learned that, especially in difficult times, it can be a challenge to rely on resources which come from certain countries. And this is also something which we want to implement much more in the future and it's also embedded in many activities of the digital program,

developing a European capacity not only for data but also for infrastructure. So setting up a European cloud, setting up a high-performance computing is a way of becoming independent,

not because we want to be isolated in the world, but because we want to be able to rely on our own resources and in case of problems be able to continue and not to depend on someone which can close or open the availability of resources which are crucial for us.