Daniel Antal | Eviota

Access to Green Finance

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:46:00 +0100

Photo: Eddie Zhang

Cultural and creative enterprises often need help with access to finance. In the EU’s policy documents, this is often attributed to their higher perceived risk, lack of tangible assets to provide collateral, and difficulty of valuing the sector’s intangible assets. Eviota aims to support access to green finance, which can alleviate the problems of many businesses.

The Creative Europe’s guarantee facility for the cultural and creative sectors and industries was based on the assumption in 2016 that the financing gap of the CCSIs was up to 1 billion euros per year ¹. In our view, this gap increased in the 2020s because the earlier estimate assumed a “business as usual” and did not estimate the transition costs to zero carbon.

The sustainable finance package estimates that to make the EU climate-neutral by 2050, Europe needs between €175 to €290 billion in additional yearly investment in the following decades². Because according to the European Investment Fund, with varying sizes in European countries, on average, 5.5% of the EU value added is related to cultural and creative sectors. We assume that the industry should be able to absorb about €8-15 billion for its transition to a more sustainable development path³. While this “financing gap” is based on a different methodology and should be seen more as a “gross financing need”, which includes the replacement of infrastructure and amortisation of infrastructure, which is in corporate finance seen as business continuity by any of means, the financing gap is enormous.

The European Green Deal has the financing capacity to meet this demand⁴. Still, in our experience with music and audiovisual enterprises, the absorption capacity towards sustainable finance is lower than with traditional, non-sustainable finance. The Survey on access to finance for cultural and creative sectors: evaluate the financial gap of different cultural and creative sectors to support the impact assessment of the Creative Europe programme identified mainly business model problems and small enterprise size as the main culprit. Our Eviota for Music highlighted another critical problem: oversimplified management controlling/reporting systems that cannot support the creative enterprise’s and its stakeholders’ business decisions. The oversimplified accounting system must provide more information for a loan application and a green loan application.

Our Eviota system hits two birds with a stone: we improve the quality of the management information and connect it with reliable sustainability indicators. We are developing ways to adhere to the requirements of the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive⁵ (i.e., the modification of the EU Accounting Directive and auditing rules) within the scope of simplified accounting typical for microenterprises. We are working on an objective measurement tool that can be used both by creative enterprises to convince their public donors, corporate sponsors, banks, insurers, and investors that their economic activities are sustainable; or to work for financial intermediary organisations to assess the financial, environmental, social and governance sustainability of their potential lenders or investees.

Survey on access to finance for cultural and creative sectors—Evaluate the financial gap of different cultural and creative sectors to support the impact assessment of the creative Europe programme ↩︎
European Commission: Financing Sustainable Growth. This factsheet is the source of the diagrams. ↩︎
European Investment Fund: Market Analysis of the Cultural and Creative Sectors in Europe—A Sector to Invest In ↩︎
Access to finance facilitating support for the Green Deal By Ambroise Fayolle, Vice-President of the European Investment Bank ↩︎
Directive (EU) 2022/2464 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 December 2022 amending Regulation (EU) No 537/2014, Directive 2004/109/EC, Directive 2006/43/EC and Directive 2013/34/EU, as regards corporate sustainability reporting (Text with EEA relevance) ↩︎

From Accounting to Environmental Accountability

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:46:00 +0100

Photo: Nick Morrison

Like all creative enterprises, music enterprises are often founded and led by creative people with artistic or technical backgrounds. In Europe and the U.S., most music technicians, artist, and their managers work in very small enterprises. These enterprises usually need qualified business or financial administrators and HR- or data specialists. They often see accounting as a necessary or even unnecessary evil that is only used to report taxes. The accounting system is often outsourced to a chartered accountant or an accounting firm, and accounts are only reviewed when it is absolutely necessary: on Tax Day.

Accounting is not a beloved activity. In the last 20 years, almost all European countries allowed further and further simplifications in financial accounting and reporting as well as tax reporting. Our experience is that, in many cases, this has led to oversimplification: the resulting financial accounting system needs to be revised to support a loan application, grant administration, or simply to identify perils to profitability or opportunities for economic growth. Such a revision is a great opportunity to take into consideration the needs of sustainability reporting.

What is simplified reporting?

If you look at the annual report of a listed company like Spotify, you see that their reports tend to be over 100 pages, and they publish mandatory reports every quarter. They employ an entire army of tax specialists to pay various dues. On the other hand, a typical music enterprise creates one mandatory report per year, which can be as thin as four pages depending on the country where the report is made.

Microenterprises often pay a simplified tax, i.e., they do not have to pay corporate profit tax, value-added tax, dividend tax, etc., separately. Simplified reporting usually applies to microenterprises (with less than 10 employees or 2 million euros of annual turnover.)

Less accounting and less granular information on the creative enterprise’s activity means less accountability for the economic or social impact of the enterprise. Creative enterprises are parts of complex value chains around film productions, music festivals, or advertising, to name a few, where tracing sources of water use, carbon footprints or strengthening injustices against women in pay or opportunity are not trivial. We believe that some level of accounting is necessary for accountability in terms of sustainability.

Eviota for Music and Eviota for Film aims to support micro- and small enterprises with better management, supported by connected financial and sustainability accounting that reflects the management novelties of 2023. We do not claim that sustainability management can be performed based on financial accounts. Still, we are confident that a financial accounting system must also register every economic activity with an environmental and social footprint. We want to help creative businesses adjust their accounting, controlling, and reporting practices because they can be more profitable. They can access the new, supported green loans and insurance. They can gain new grants and donors. And eventually, they can avoid greenwashing and pinkwashing.

Eviota is simple but not oversimplified. We connect your general ledger to reliable benchmarks and apply double materiality facts to focus your attention on financial performance and your environmental footprint. We aim to create a reliable, informative overview of your enterprise in less than an hour and start planning your transition to a more sustainable growth path.

Sustainability measurement and reporting for the CFO

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0100

The Eviota project aims to create sustainability reports connected to the financial accounts of companies, NGOs, and civil society actors. The first phase concentrates on greenhouse gases and air pollutants. We want to create reliable estimates of the carbon and other pollutants footprint of music-related (social) enterprises based on their spending (“connected financial and sustainability reporting”.)

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

16:30: Meet and greet
17:00: Short presentation
17:15: Discussion of your reporting

The discussion will be based on the accounting documents sent to us in advance. We will create a first version of a simplified sustainability report about your music or film company (for profit, or non-profit.) we will not share any financial information in the meetup, only visualizations of risk heatmaps, and common reporting and sustainability problems.

Why connect to your accounting software?

The accounting system already records all those economic events that may have an impact on how your company, directly or indirectly, causes greenhouse gas emissions, uses precious water, or may help to close (or, accidentally, widen) the gender pay gap.

As soon as the modification of the EU accounting directive take effect, you will have to connect your financial accounts to your sustainability reporting.

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We start from the annual summary of supplier and buyer ledgers, or the trial balance that has this information.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries. It is easy to reconcile with US GAAP based documents.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity.

This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

New trends in controlling: the strategic and digital challenge

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:30:00 +0100

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

16:30: Meet and greet
17:00: Short presentation
17:15: Discussion of your reporting

Why connect to your accounting software?

As soon as the modification of the EU accounting directive take effect, you will have to connect your financial accounts to your sustainability reporting.

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We start from the annual summary of supplier and buyer ledgers, or the trial balance that has this information.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries. It is easy to reconcile with US GAAP based documents.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity.

Sustainability measurement and reporting for the CFO - the case of the music and film industries

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 15:00:00 +0100

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Introduction 2. Our Approach 3. Main Features 4. Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting 5. Why are we developing it? 6. Is There a Film/TV Industry Version? 7. Questions

Introduction

Timeline

2019: European Green Deal and Sustainable Finance Disclosures Regulation.

2020: 2030 EU climate target (-55%); EFRAG to standardize connected financial and sustainability reporting (IFRS, GRI, SASB/IIRC, TCFD, WICI, UN).

2021: Strategy for financing the transition to a sustainable economy; CSRD announced (changes in EU accounting and audit law); Reprex Eviota concept based on our iotables 0.4.7, which was updated with environmental impact analysis.

2022: EU Taxonomy (“Climate Delegated Act” see: FAQ). Reprex Music Eviota with MusicAIRE and wins Hague Innovators Award Audience Prize; Horizon Europe Research & Innovation winner.

Future Timeline

2023: Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD); first 50,000 companies apply the new rules for the financial year 2024 (report in in 2025.) Investors, banks, insurance companies, granting organizations, corporate donors, even audiences want to see more and more proof of conducting sustainable business.

2024: CSRD for the first 50,000 companies.

2025: First mandatory connected reporting for 50,000 large companies and listed SMEs.

2026: The European Commission plans to extend the EU taxonomy to six environmental objectives and rules for about 50,000 companies by 2026. Many small companies will have to make mandatory disclosures and reporting.

Sustainability Reporting Architecture

Our approach

Cultural & Creative Sectors Industries Approach

Main Features

Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting

In 2020 the European Commission requested technical advice, mandating the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group, EFRAG, to undertake preparatory work for the elaboration of possible EU non-financial reporting standards in a revised EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive (i.e., harmonizing financial reporting and audit with connected sustainability reporting) within the framework of the European Green Deal sustainable finance package and the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive.

Ongoing Standardization

🖱 Link: EUROPEAN LAB – Project Task Force on Preparatory Work for the Elaboration of Possible EU Non-Financial Reporting Standards

Why Are We Developing Eviota for Music?

CSRD/EFRAG Timeline in the EU

Is There A Film Industry Version?

Yes, it is coming! Ask for a demo on Email | Keybase | LinkedIn.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal | Reprex

Data Observatory Labs

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 18:12:00 +0100

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Short Conceptual Video

WP Project Coordination

1. Reprex aims to coordinate this project with a dedicated, experienced Creative Europe project manager who is familiar with the music and audiovisual creation.

2. Because of the project size and subsidy rate (60%) every partner must contribute to financing WP Project Coordination in proportion to their effective subsidies.

WP Sustainability

Extend the usability of Eviota (a Scope 2-3 music ESG reporting tool) and GreenEyes (Scope 1 film ESG reporting tool) to work with music, film, books, and publishing.
Introduce these new methods to business school and vocational training courses.
Get regulatory approval to use in the context of the green finance package.

WP Survey Recycling

Utilize the survey harmonization and recycling tools developed in music to be available for film, television, photography, and book publishing users.
Extend harmonized question banks, and remove interoperability and semantic barriers to reuse data from previous audience and policy surveys for these CCSIs.
Subsidize the initial costs in use to transfer from non-reusable market research to reusable, collaborative market research.

WP Heritage Reuse

Utilize the best practices from music archives, film archives, and private photography archives to remove copyright law, ethical, interoperability, and semantic barriers to mix archival/heritage and new content in music, film, and photography (including in books.)
Create a special-purpose record label and audiovisual distributor that specializes in difficult, out-of-commerce/archival/commercial derivative work distribution on global streaming platforms.
Build a best practice for the legal and ethical public performance of derivative works that are made from archival/heritage (which were not deposited with the intent to be commercially used or widely circulated) and new creations.

WP AI & Big Data That Works For Everyone

Utilize the best practices from data feminism, music, and film distribution of niche, marginalized content, and create a general framework that reduces inequalities created by lower data representation (of women, small countries, small languages) that result in new injustice on algorithmic platforms. See publication.
Build new music, film, and photography information services that reduce the data imbalances, and make small language (for example, Estonian) or historically underrepresented (for example, female artists) more likely to be recommended by AI-driven algorithmic platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, or Amazon.
Create open source solutions and open knowledge that enables small, independent music, documentary, photography, and book publishers to build audiences, and monetize content with big data and AI algorithms that work for everyone, not only male artists, English language content, and mainstream works.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal | Reprex

Music Eviota

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 11:13:00 +0200

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🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.)

Introduction 2. Our Approach 3. Main Features 4. Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting 5. Why are we developing it? 6. Is There a Film/TV Industry Version? 7. Questions

Introduction

Sustainability Reporting Architecture

Our approach

Main Features

Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting

Ongoing Standardization

🖱 Link: EUROPEAN LAB – Project Task Force on Preparatory Work for the Elaboration of Possible EU Non-Financial Reporting Standards

Why Are We Developing Eviota for Music?

CSRD/EFRAG Timeline in the EU

Is There A Film Industry Version?

Yes, it is coming! Ask for a demo on Email | Keybase | LinkedIn.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal | Reprex

Reprex

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 16:00:00 +0200

Big Data Creates Inequalities

Only the largest corporations, best-endowed universities, and rich governments can afford data collection and processing capacities that are large enough to harness the advantages of AI.

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Big data that works for all

Reprex: No matter how big is the problem or how small is your team, we fill your reports, dashboards, newsletters, books with data and its visualization.

Connected financial and sustainability reporting based on open data

Eviota: We map your material impacts in your value chain and connect it with environmental or social data that is re-used from the public sector.

Data problems: Reprex

Most SMEs, and civil society organizations do not have a data scientist/engineer in their team, maybe not even an IT person or a HR professional to make such a hire.
When these organizations must solve novel problems, like connecting their financial accounts with environmental and social impact data or connecting to automated transaction systems (like in music), they need novel solutions that do not require managing a database within their organization.

Data problems: Eviota

Most SMEs, and civil society organizations do not have a data scientist/engineer in their team, maybe not even an IT person or a HR professional to make such a hire.
To access green bank loans, insurance products, subsidies, or investments, or to keep track of their sustainability goals in line with the Paris Accord or gender equality plan, organizations must connect their accounting system to external environmental data. We connect their accounts with impact estimates from reliable scientific sources.

Data problems (examples)


	The cost of questionnaire-based market research (survey) is increasing exponentially and offers mediocre results without an enormous question bank and harmonization with other surveys.(See 🖱 blogpost)
	Manual data acquisition is an error-prone and boring task for humans that requires many working hours (often not credited in consultancies, law firms, or research institutes.)
	Wrangling spreadsheet tables or word processor documents by people without data knowledge is the 🖱 data Sisyphus.

Our solution: Reprex

We create data ecosystems with the modernization of the EU/OECD/UN-endorsed 'data observatory' concept. Our data observatory 3.0 uses the knowledge graphs of the web of data.
We acquire and process data on a scale in our data observatories. We acquire and process data on a scale in our data observatories. Our approach significantly reduces the cost of data acquisition and opens invisible, reliable governmental and scientific data sources. We are currently building five observatories, and one of them is already mature enough to be considered for official EU recognition (serving the music industry).
We provide applications, for example, our Eviota application, which connects financial accounts with environmental and social data, and crates reliable indicators and benchmarks for the requirements of the sustainable finance package.

Our solution: Eviota (Non-Financial)

We create data ecosystems with the modernization of the EU/OECD/UN-endorsed 'data observatory' concept. Our Green Deal Data Observatory uses the knowledge graphs of the web of data and gives access to reliable, often unseen, hard-to-access ESG data sources.
We acquire and process data on a scale in our data observatories. Our approach significantly reduces the cost of data acquisition and opens invisible, reliable governmental and scientific data sources.
We provide applications, for example, our Eviota application, which connects financial accounts with environmental and social data, and crates reliable indicators and benchmarks for the requirements of the sustainable finance package. Unlike our competitors, we can serve SMEs, too, at a competitive cost.

Our solution: Eviota (For Banks)

We create data ecosystems with the modernization of the EU/OECD/UN-endorsed 'data observatory' concept. Our Green Deal Data Observatory uses the knowledge graphs of the web of data and gives access to reliable, often unseen, hard-to-access ESG data sources.
We acquire and process data on a scale in our data observatories. Our approach significantly reduces the cost of data acquisition and opens invisible, reliable governmental and scientific data sources.
We provide applications, for example, our Eviota application, which connects financial accounts with environmental and social data, and crates reliable indicators and benchmarks for the requirements of the sustainable finance package. We are validating our product in the regulatory sandbox of a central bank to show that we provide a cost-effective solution to many regulatory problems opened by the new [sustainable finance package of the EU](https://finance.ec.europa.eu/publications/sustainable-finance-package_en).

UNIIQ

Objectives, including product roadmap (technology/time/money)
Schematic overview of developments since inception

Market

Competition

Know-how and integration of open source components

Reprex has a special know-how to map and connect private datasets managing the boundaries of organizations that often have conflicting interests. Our know-how was developed over 10 years, and the data of about 60, often conflicting music industry actors in 12 countries.
Our team has many years of experience with working public sector information reuse, or 'open data', and have built reliable open source software to process legally open, not readily downloadable, and very valuable information that is not available for market vendors.
We use RDF (linked open data) and other technologies to link scattered small data to big data; we use our own R libraries to test and process various data into reliable statistical data or indicators.
Based on our unique data access and software we are developing the Eviota App to connect financial accounts and environmental, social and governance data.

Team [rewrite with GDO]


	The two co-founders, 🖱 Daniel Antal, CFA and 🖱 Andrés García Molina, PhD, and the core team manage the ecosystems’ development, develop knowledge management, and direct the software development. 🖱 Team on full screen
	Each observatory has a broader team of users, data and knowledge curators, and developers. The most developed 🖱️ Digital Music Observatory has 16 institutional users and a team of about 20 music and data professionals. The newer observatories have a smaller, initial service development and data curatorial team.

Timeline

Inception: Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Product Market Fit Validation with the Digital Music Observatory
New observatory development started with computational antitrust, ESG reporting, and
Several, peer reviewed software releases
DMO has more than 20 curators, 3 million euro budget for 3 years, increasing user base.
Eviota and the Green Deal

We are part of rOpenGov and have access to very special knowledge working with national accounts data and ESG data used by governments to keep track with the Paris Accord. We can access data cheaper, faster, better than our competitors.
We have a know-how to manage conflicts of interest and very complex data use rights.

Data observatories 3.0

Reprex is offering shared data ecosystems. Our observatories are great solutions for organizations without a data specialization:


🌳 Organizations that cannot afford to build a large enough data team to sustain consistent, extensive data collection and processing (many large institutions and companies)
🪴 Who cannot hire even a single data engineer or a data scientist (medium-sized companies, NGOs)
🌱 Who do not even have a permanent IT function (about 2 million European small enterprises and civil society organizations)


	The European Union, the World Bank, OECD, and UN have facilitated the creation of more than 80 so-called ‘data observatories’ to help companies, researchers, NGOs, and governments systematically collect data and knowledge.
	We are currently building one prototype for the European Music Observatory financed by the European Union and music industry players (cc 3-4 million euros.) We would like to take over existing or start new observatories in 2 years at least 5)
	Our observatories are competitive, because they use high-quality open source scientific software; they exploit the new Data Governance Act and Open Data Directive, deploy web 3.0 data synchronization, and offer great value-added research products.

Platform products	Value added data applications
The European Union, the World Bank, OECD, and UN have facilitated the creation of more than 80 so-called ‘data observatories’ to help companies, researchers, NGOs, and governments systematically collect data and knowledge.	The different observatories offer different types of knowledge products, such as statistical yearbooks, various apps, and database access.
Most of them use web 1.0 technologies, inefficient knowledge accumulation. Already 20 of them have been discontinued.	We are developing software solutions that exploit our platforms: we harmonize surveys, statistical data, automate research reporting, elements of market monitoring or ESG reporting.
We are currently building one prototype for the European Music Observatory financed by the European Union and music industry players (cc 3-4 million euros.) We would like to take over existing or start new observatories in 2 years at least 5)	Each observatory gives us intimidate customer access to 3-4 large universities, 1-2 large consultancies, and various specialist institutions.

Marketing strategy


	Buma/Stemra like copyright management agencies, music export offices, festivals and venues, University of Amsterdam, Sant’Anna, Economic University of Bratislava, ministries of culture, grant agencies.
	University of Amsterdam, Europeana, Sant’Anna, Hungarian Film Fund
	Connected financial and sustainability reporting: bank consultancies, big four audit companies, large environmental NGOs.
	Antitrust agencies, law firms, economics consultancies working with mergers and other competition related issues.

Target market size


The observatory platforms usually have a build-up cost of about 3-5 million euros and an annual running costs of 0.1-3 million euros.	We hope to gain at least 10% global market share on the observatory platform management market to pay our basic data science team and R&D.
Our existing observatories give us access to the market and public surveying markets (cc € 30-40 bn in the developed nations), particularly to its software component (€ 10 billion euros).	retroharmonize integrates pre-existing questionnaire-based surveys and new surveys. We see interest from the biggest global players.
Our existing observatories gave us access to environmental impact assessment and currently we build an ESG reporting tool with a central bank, a value bank, and a big four company.	Connected ESG reporting has a €4 bn market in the EU alone, and our Eviota product is very competitive. Due to regulatory pressure, we can harvest a decent share if we are able to attract venture capital.

The observatory platforms usually have a build-up cost of about 3-5 million euros and an annual running costs of 0.1-3 million euros.

We hope to gain at least 10% global market share on the observatory platform management market to pay our basic data science team and R&D.

Our existing observatories give us access to the market and public surveying markets (cc € 30-40 bn in the developed nations), particularly to its software component (€ 10 billion euros).

retroharmonize integrates pre-existing questionnaire-based surveys and new surveys. We see interest from the biggest global players.

Our existing observatories gave us access to environmental impact assessment and currently we build an ESG reporting tool with a central bank, a value bank, and a big four company.

Connected ESG reporting has a €4 bn market in the EU alone, and our Eviota product is very competitive. Due to regulatory pressure, we can harvest a decent share if we are able to attract venture capital.

Team


	The two co-founders, 🖱 Daniel Antal, CFA and 🖱 Andrés García Molina, PhD, and the core team manage the ecosystems’ development, develop knowledge management, and direct the software development. 🖱 Team on full screen
	Each observatory has a broader team of users, data and knowledge curators, and developers. The most developed 🖱️ Digital Music Observatory has 16 institutional users and a team of about 20 music and data professionals. The newer observatories have a smaller, initial service development and data curatorial team.

Traction


💻 Our free scientific software products have a steadily growing user base (several thousand users globally.)
📈 We are able to convert this to paying research automation services at a higher growth rate.
🚀 We won four competitive tenders this year, but we feel that the slow tendering/acquisition/cash cycle is hampering our growth, we see far more opportunities that we can serve. Therefore we are looking for investors.

Funding


We have a good track record in EU tenders, but we would like to build up this reputation in the Netherlands, too, mainly for new platforms.
We help our non-profit users, such as cultural heritage organizations, music export offices, collective rights management agencies to get funding to use our platforms and services
Our for profit-users need a more polished, user-friendlier front-end. Some are interested in joint ventures (like exploiting our survey capabilities). Venture capital would be preferred, as demand outstrips growth.

Do it Smarter

They usually do not exchange standard data with statistical agencies, they are not synchronized on knowledge graphs of the Europeana or national libraries, and their research output is usually not to be found on open science repositories.
The Hague is the winner of the World Smart City Award 2021, and we would like to attract the planned European Music Observatory and other, EU/UNESCO recognized institutions into the town building on the innovations of Reprex and the ecosystem of the Hague.

Questions?

Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Reprex

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Data API

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Our observatory has a new data API which allows access to our daily refreshing open data. You can access the API via api.economy.dataobservatory.eu (apologies for the ugly, temporary subdomain masking!).

All the data and the metadata are available as open data, without database use restrictions, under the ODbL license. However, the metadata contents are not finalized yet. We are currently working on a solution that applies the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, and fulfills the mandatory requirements of the Dublic Core metadata standards and at the same time the mandatory requirements, and most of the recommended requirements of DataCite. These changes will be effective before 1 July 2021.

The Competition Data Observatory temporarily shares an API with the Economy Data Observatory, which serves as an incubator for similar economy-oriented reproducible research resources.

Indicator table

The indicator table contains the actual values, and the various estimated/imputed values of the indicator, clearly marking missing values, too.

api.economy.dataobservatory.eu: indicator retrieval

You can get the data in CSV or json format, or write SQL querries. (Tutorials in SQL, R, Python will be posted shortly.)

Description metadata table

Processing Metadata table

The metadata table contains various data processing information, such as the first and last actual observation of the indicator, the number of approximated, forecasted, backcasted values, last update at source and in our system, and so on.

api.economy.dataobservatory.eu: processing metadata

Authoritative Copies

Greendeal Data Observatory on Zenodo

Metadata

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The Competition Data Observatory temporarily shares an API with the Economy Data Observatory, which serves as an incubator for similar economy-oriented reproducible research resources.

api.economy.dataobservatory.eu: processing metadata

Descriptive Metadata


Identifier	An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context. (Dublin Core item), but several identifiders allowed, and we will use several of them.
Creator	The main researchers involved in producing the data, or the authors of the publication, in priority order. To supply multiple creators, repeat this property. (Extends the Dublin Core with multiple authors, and legal persons, and adds affiliation data.)
Title	A name given to the resource. Extends Dublin Core with alternative title, subtitle, translated Title, and other title(s).
Publisher	The name of the entity that holds, archives, publishes prints, distributes, releases, issues, or produces the resource. This property will be used to formulate the citation, so consider the prominence of the role. For software, use Publisher for the code repository. (Dublin Core item.)
Publication Year	The year when the data was or will be made publicly available.
Resource Type	We publish Datasets, Images, Report, and Data Papers. (Dublin Core item with controlled vocabulary.)

Recommended for discovery

The Recommended (R) properties are optional, but strongly recommended for interoperability.


Subject	The topic of the resource. (Dublin Core item.)
Contributor	The institution or person responsible for collecting, managing, distributing, or otherwise contributing to the development of the resource. (Extends the Dublin Core with multiple authors, and legal persons, and adds affiliation data.) When applicable, we add Distributor (of the datasets and images), Contact Person, Data Collector, Data Curator, Data Manager, Hosting Institution, Producer (for images), Project Manager, Researcher, Research Group, Rightsholder, Sponsor, Supervisor
Date	A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource, besides the Dublin Core minimum we add Collected, Created, Issued, Updated, and if necessary, Withdrawn dates to our datasets.
Related Identifier	An identifier or identifiers other than the primary Identifier applied to the resource being registered.
Rights	We give SPDX License List standards rights description with URLs to the actual license. (Dublin Core item: Rights Management)
Description	Recommended for discovery.(Dublin Core item.)
GeoLocation	Similar to Dublin Core item Coverage

The Subject property: we need to set standard coding schemas for each observatory.
Contributor property:
- DataCurator the curator of the dataset, who sets the mandatory properties.
- DataManager the person who keeps the dataset up-to-date.
- ContactPerson the person who can be contacted for reuse requests or bug reports.
The Date property contains the following dates, which are set automatically by the dataobservatory R package:
- Updated when the dataset was updated;
- EarliestObservation, which the earliest, not backcasted, estimated or imputed observation.
- LatestObservation, which the earliest, not backcasted, estimated or imputed observation.
- UpdatedatSource, when the raw data source was last updated.
The GeoLocation is automatically created by the dataobservatory R package.
The Description property optional elements, and we adopted them as follows for the observatories:
- The Abstract is a short, textual description; we try to automate its creation as much as a possible, but some curatorial input is necessary.
- In the TechnicalInfo sub-field, we record automatically the utils::sessionInfo() for computational reproducability. This is automatically created by the dataobservatory R package.
- In the Other sub-field, we record the keywords for structuring the observatory.

Optional

The Optional (O) properties are optional and provide richer description. For findability they are not so important, but to create a web service, they are essential. In the mandatory and recommended fields, we are following other metadata standards and codelists, but in the optional fields we have to build up our own system for the observatories.


Language	A language of the resource. (Dublin Core item.)
Alternative Identifier	An identifier or identifiers other than the primary Identifier applied to the resource being registered.
Size	We give the CSV, downloadable dataset size in bytes.
Format	We give file format information. We mainly use CSV and JSON, and occasionally rds and SPSS types. (Dublin Core item.)
Version	The version number of the resource.
Rights	We give SPDX License List standards rights description with URLs to the actual license. (Dublin Core item: Rights Management)
Funding Reference	We provide the funding reference information when applicable. This is usually mandatory with public funds.
Related Item	We give information about our observatory partners’ related research products, awards, grants (also Dublin Core item as Relation.) We particularly include source information when the dataset is derived from another resource (which is a Dublin Core item.)

In the Language we only use English (eng) at the moment.
By default We do not use the Alternative Identifier property. We will do this when the same dataset will be used in several observatories.
The Size property is measured in bytes for the CSV representation of the dataset. During creations, the software creates a temporary CSV file to check if the dataset has no writing problems, and measures the dataset size.
The Version property needs further work. For a daily re-freshing API we need to find an applicable versioning system.
The Funding reference will contain information for donors, sponsors, and co-financing partners.
Our default setting for Rights is the CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 license and we provide an URI for the license document.
In the RelatedItem we give information about:
- The original (raw) data source.
- Methodological bibilography reference, when needed.
- The open-source statistical software code that processed the data.

Administrative (Processing) Metadata

Administrative Metadata

Like with diamonds, it is better to know the history of a dataset, too. Our administrative metadata contains codelists that follow the SXDX statistical metadata standards, and similarly strucutred information about the processing history of the dataset.

See for further reference The codebook Class.


Observation Status	SDMX Code list for Observation Status 2.2 (CL_OBS_STATUS), such as actual, missing, imputed, etc. values.
Method	If the value is estimated, we provide modelling information.
Unit	We provide the measurement unit of the data (when applicable.)
Frequency	SDMX Code list for Frequency 2.1 (CL_FREQ) frequency values
Codelist	Euros-SDMX Codelist entries for the observational units, such as sex, etc.
Imputation	SDMX Code list for Frequency 2.1 (CL_IMPUT_METH) imputation values
Estimation	The estimation methodology of data that we calculated, together with citation information and URI to the actual processing code
Related Item	We give information about the software code that processed the data (both Dublin Core and DataCite compliant.)

See an example in the The codebook Class article of the dataobservatory R package.

Identifying Roadblocks to Net Zero Legislation

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In our use case we are merging data about Europe’s coal regions, harmonized surveys about the acceptance of climate policies, and socio-economic data. While the work starts out from existing European research, our retroharmonize survey harmonization solution, our regions sub-national boundary harmonization solution and iotables allows us to connect open data and open knowledge from other coal regions of the world, for example, from the Appalachian economy.

Policy Context

The Just Transition Platform aims to assist EU countries and regions to unlock the support available through the Just Transition Mechanism. It builds on and expands the work of the existing Initiative for Coal Regions in Transition, which already supports fossil fuel producing regions across the EU in achieving a just transition through tailored, needs-oriented assistance and capacity-building.

The Initiative has a secretariat that is co-run by Ecorys, Climate Strategies, ICLEI Europe, and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate. While the initiative is an EU project, it cooperates with other similar initiatives, for example, with the Coalfield Development social enterprise in the Appalachian economy.

Data Sources

Coal regions: Our starting point is the EU coal regions: opportunities and challenges ahead publication Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service. This publication maps Europe’s coal dependent energy and transport infrastructure, and regions that depend on coal-related jobs.
Harmonized Survey Data: The dataset of the Eurobarometer 91.3 (April 2019) harmonized survey. Our transition policy variable is the four-level agreement with the statement More public financial support should be given to the transition to clean energies even if it means subsidies to fossil fuels should be reduced (EN) and Davantage de soutien financier public devrait être donné à la transition vers les énergies propres même si cela signifie que les subventions aux énergies fossiles devraient être réduites (FR) which is then translated to the language use of all participating country.
Environmental Variables: We used data on pm and SO2 polution measured by participating stations in the European Environmental Agency’s monitoring program. The station locations were mapped by Milos to the NUTS sub-national regions.

Exploratory Data Analysis

Our coal-dependency dummy variable is base on the policy document Coal regions in transition.

readRDS(file.path("data", "coal_regions.rds"))

## # A tibble: 253 x 5
##    country_code_is~ region_nuts_nam~ region_nuts_cod~ coal_region is_coal_region
##    <chr>            <fct>            <chr>            <chr>                <dbl>
##  1 BE               Brussels hoofds~ BE10             <NA>                     0
##  2 BE               Liege            BE33             <NA>                     0
##  3 BE               Brabant Wallon   BE31             <NA>                     0
##  4 BE               Antwerpen        BE21             <NA>                     0
##  5 BE               Limburg [BE]     BE22             <NA>                     0
##  6 BE               Oost-Vlaanderen  BE23             <NA>                     0
##  7 BE               Vlaams Brabant   BE24             <NA>                     0
##  8 BE               West-Vlaanderen  BE25             <NA>                     0
##  9 BE               Hainaut          BE32             <NA>                     0
## 10 BE               Namur            BE35             <NA>                     0
## # ... with 243 more rows

Our exploratory data analysis shows that respondent in 2019, agreement with the policy measure significantly differed among EU member states and regions.

transition_policy <- eb19_raw %>%
  rowid_to_column() %>%
  mutate ( transition_policy = normalize_text(transition_policy)) %>%
  fastDummies::dummy_cols(select_columns = 'transition_policy') %>%
  mutate ( transition_policy_agree = case_when(
    transition_policy_totally_agree + transition_policy_tend_to_agree > 0 ~ 1, 
    TRUE ~ 0
  )) %>%
  mutate ( transition_policy_disagree = case_when(
    transition_policy_totally_disagree + transition_policy_tend_to_disagree > 0 ~ 1, 
    TRUE ~ 0
  )) 

eb19_df  <- transition_policy %>% 
  left_join ( air_pollutants, by = 'region_nuts_codes' ) %>%
  mutate ( is_poland = ifelse ( country_code == "PL", 1, 0))

Preliminary Results

Significantly more people agree where

there are more polutants
who are younger
where people are more educated

Significantly less people agree

in rural areas
where more people are older
where more people are less educated
in less polluted areas
in coal regions

A simple model run:

c("transition_policy_totally_agree" , "pm10", "so2", "age_exact", "is_highly_educated" , "is_rural")

## [1] "transition_policy_totally_agree" "pm10"                           
## [3] "so2"                             "age_exact"                      
## [5] "is_highly_educated"              "is_rural"

summary( glm ( transition_policy_totally_agree ~ pm10 + so2 + 
                 age_exact +
                 is_highly_educated + is_rural + is_coal_region +
                 country_code, 
               data = eb19_df, 
               family = binomial ))

## 
## Call:
## glm(formula = transition_policy_totally_agree ~ pm10 + so2 + 
##     age_exact + is_highly_educated + is_rural + is_coal_region + 
##     country_code, family = binomial, data = eb19_df)
## 
## Deviance Residuals: 
##     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max  
## -1.7690  -1.0253  -0.8165   1.2264   1.9085  
## 
## Coefficients:
##                      Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept)        -0.1975096  0.0921551  -2.143 0.032095 *  
## pm10                0.0068505  0.0017445   3.927 8.60e-05 ***
## so2                 0.1381994  0.0405867   3.405 0.000662 ***
## age_exact          -0.0075018  0.0007873  -9.529  < 2e-16 ***
## is_highly_educated  0.2953905  0.0311127   9.494  < 2e-16 ***
## is_rural           -0.1277983  0.0313321  -4.079 4.53e-05 ***
## is_coal_region     -0.2624005  0.0640233  -4.099 4.16e-05 ***
## country_codeBE     -0.3290891  0.0916117  -3.592 0.000328 ***
## country_codeBG     -0.6470116  0.1125114  -5.751 8.89e-09 ***
## country_codeCY      0.8471483  0.1273306   6.653 2.87e-11 ***
## country_codeCZ     -0.5754008  0.0965974  -5.957 2.57e-09 ***
## country_codeDE      0.0106430  0.0856322   0.124 0.901088    
## country_codeDK      0.0577724  0.0925391   0.624 0.532429    
## country_codeEE     -0.8041188  0.0989047  -8.130 4.28e-16 ***
## country_codeES      1.1266903  0.0941495  11.967  < 2e-16 ***
## country_codeFI     -0.2617501  0.0946837  -2.764 0.005702 ** 
## country_codeFR      0.0130239  0.1639339   0.079 0.936678    
## country_codeGB      0.2454631  0.0891845   2.752 0.005918 ** 
## country_codeGR      0.2169278  0.1209199   1.794 0.072816 .  
## country_codeHR     -0.1632727  0.1001563  -1.630 0.103064    
## country_codeHU      0.5779928  0.1020987   5.661 1.50e-08 ***
## country_codeIT     -0.1427249  0.0940144  -1.518 0.128985    
## country_codeLU     -0.3111627  0.1140426  -2.728 0.006363 ** 
## country_codeLV     -0.6246590  0.0963526  -6.483 8.99e-11 ***
## country_codeMT      0.3303363  0.1228611   2.689 0.007173 ** 
## country_codeNL      0.1707080  0.0902189   1.892 0.058470 .  
## country_codePL     -0.2843198  0.1228657  -2.314 0.020664 *  
## country_codePT      0.1447295  0.0899079   1.610 0.107452    
## country_codeRO     -0.0479674  0.0930433  -0.516 0.606177    
## country_codeSE      0.4865939  0.0922486   5.275 1.33e-07 ***
## country_codeSK     -0.2427307  0.0964652  -2.516 0.011861 *  
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## (Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)
## 
##     Null deviance: 30568  on 22401  degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 29313  on 22371  degrees of freedom
##   (5253 observations deleted due to missingness)
## AIC: 29375
## 
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 4

summary( glm ( transition_policy_agree ~ pm10 + so2 + age_exact +
                 is_highly_educated + is_rural, 
               data = eb19_df, 
               family = binomial ))

## 
## Call:
## glm(formula = transition_policy_agree ~ pm10 + so2 + age_exact + 
##     is_highly_educated + is_rural, family = binomial, data = eb19_df)
## 
## Deviance Residuals: 
##     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max  
## -2.1970   0.5035   0.5803   0.6495   0.8465  
## 
## Coefficients:
##                     Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept)         1.807823   0.079297  22.798  < 2e-16 ***
## pm10                0.005092   0.001239   4.108 3.99e-05 ***
## so2                 0.003274   0.051410   0.064  0.94922    
## age_exact          -0.009781   0.000988  -9.900  < 2e-16 ***
## is_highly_educated  0.396743   0.039735   9.985  < 2e-16 ***
## is_rural           -0.107448   0.037953  -2.831  0.00464 ** 
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## (Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)
## 
##     Null deviance: 20488  on 22401  degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 20250  on 22396  degrees of freedom
##   (5253 observations deleted due to missingness)
## AIC: 20262
## 
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 4

Next Steps

After careful documentation, we will very soon publish all the processed, clean datasets on the EU Zenodo repository with clear digital object identification and versioning.
We will seek contact with the Secretariat of the Initiative for Coal Regions in Transition to process all the data annexes in the EU coal regions: opportunities and challenges ahead report.
With our volunteers we want to include coal regions from the United States, Latin America, Australia, Africa first – because we have harmonized survey results – and gradually add the rest of the world.
We will ask political scientists and policy researchers to interpret our findings.

Daniel Antal | Eviota

Access to Green Finance

From Accounting to Environmental Accountability

Sustainability measurement and reporting for the CFO

New trends in controlling: the strategic and digital challenge

Sustainability measurement and reporting for the CFO - the case of the music and film industries

Slide navigation

Contents

Introduction

Timeline

Future Timeline

Sustainability Reporting Architecture

Our approach

Cultural & Creative Sectors Industries Approach

Main Features

Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting

Ongoing Standardization

Why Are We Developing Eviota for Music?

CSRD/EFRAG Timeline in the EU

Is There A Film Industry Version?

Questions?

Data Observatory Labs

Slide navigation

Short Conceptual Video

WP Project Coordination

WP Sustainability

WP Survey Recycling

WP Heritage Reuse

WP AI & Big Data That Works For Everyone

Questions?

Music Eviota

Slide navigation

Contents

Introduction

Sustainability Reporting Architecture

Our approach

Main Features

Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting

Ongoing Standardization

Why Are We Developing Eviota for Music?

CSRD/EFRAG Timeline in the EU

Is There A Film Industry Version?

Questions?

Reprex

Big Data Creates Inequalities

Slide navigation

Big data that works for all

Connected financial and sustainability reporting based on open data

Data problems: Reprex

Data problems: Eviota

Data problems (examples)

Our solution: Reprex

Our solution: Eviota (Non-Financial)

Our solution: Eviota (For Banks)

UNIIQ

Market

Competition

Know-how and integration of open source components

Team [rewrite with GDO]

Timeline

Data observatories 3.0

Marketing strategy

Target market size

Team

Traction

Funding

Do it Smarter

Questions?

Data API

Indicator table

Description metadata table

Processing Metadata table

Authoritative Copies

Metadata

Descriptive Metadata

Recommended for discovery

Optional

Administrative (Processing) Metadata

Administrative Metadata

Identifying Roadblocks to Net Zero Legislation