Explanatory Memorandum to COM(2004)96 - Multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable

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dossier COM(2004)96 - Multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable.
source COM(2004)96 EN
date 13-02-2004
1. Introduction

In the period since the inception of the eContent programme i, the digital content market has seen change. The change that occurred is neither entirely coincident with, nor as extensive as, what was foreseen at the time. The information and communication technologies (ICT) markets slowed down in general, this in turn adversely impacted the information market. However technological deployment, development and innovation have continued and many sectors, among them the information market, are again seeing growth.

The rollout of high-speed, always-on, broadband connections is beginning to drive the demand for online digital content. As recognised by eEurope 2005 i, the successful rollout of broadband Internet access however depends critically on the availability of suitable digital content. The speed of uptake of advanced services for mobile users (3G and beyond) is similarly dependent on the availability and accessibility of a large variety of digital content. More recently, developments in knowledge and content technologies open up opportunities to improve the accessibility of digital content and to greatly simplify its aggregation and reuse in products and services.

In parallel with these developments, new legislation has been enacted in the Union, including the Directive on the re-use of Public Sector Information (PSI) i and the Copyright Directive i currently being transposed, both of which aim to facilitate an internal market for digital content products and services.

These trends are expected to deliver benefits through digital content-based applications, in the form of increased productivity and innovation, and better information products and services with a positive impact on eGovernment, eHealth, eBusiness and eLearning related content, applications and services as promoted by eEurope 2005. These benefits are not just economic, but will spill over to society as well.

The content market encompasses media and publishing, on-line databases and other business services. Its value was estimated at 515 billion Euro in 2002 i. Digital content is still a small part of this market, which is traditionally dominated by films, TV programmes, books, videos, music, CDs and mail order catalogues.

Media convergence and the global reach of the Internet have turned digital content into a potentially lucrative asset. However, in relation to the uptake of digital content Europe has barriers. In particular, barriers relating to the multiplicity of languages, cultures and practices of public administration and enterprises affect the establishment of cross border services in Europe based on digital content.

The current eContentplus proposal (2005-2008) addresses these barriers and identifies areas of public interest in Europe where market forces fail to support adequate investment. eContent plus aims at creating conditions for broader access to and use of digital content and where necessary for greater economic return from services based on access and (re)use of digital content. The programme will therefore continue to make a significant contribution to the eEurope strategy in sectors such as e-learning, e-government, etc.

The proposal for a successor programme which follows gives due attention to the achievements of the current programme, the evolution of technologies, markets and the legislative environment, and further changes in course which are likely to occur.

Contents

1.

2. The growing importance of digital content


The growing importance of digital content today can be attributed to two major innovations: the digitisation of traditional media formats such as text, images, video, audio, and the emergence of the Internet as a platform for integration and a channel for distribution of content resources. In addition to making a wealth of information accessible to users, these innovations have transformed the business of content distribution and reinvented the way that businesses, public organisations and governments interact with each other and the public at large.

More recently businesses and governments seek to capitalise on the Internet's potential to drive efficiencies and spur growth. The creation in Europe of a legal framework to support online commerce and services across borders i together with massive capital investments in infrastructure financed by public and private sectors bear testimony to the importance that the online environment has been accorded in today's economy. Regulatory pressure has also been used to get citizens connected to the Internet. In the three years since the EU regulation on local loop unbundling i, Internet penetration has grown significantly in the Union, in particular among citizens. Close to 100% of companies, government offices and educational institutions, and 50% of citizens are online. Priorities have now shifted to the rollout of broadband Internet access. The benefits for users are clear - speed - which in turn is expected to drive user demand for a greater variety of digital content products and services.

With the online environment assuming an ever-increasing role in diffusing knowledge and dispersing information, the demand for quality digital content becomes inescapable. The question is no longer whether information can be found, but whether it is reliable, complete and can be tailored to the user needs. The paradigm shift taking place in the information market is from quantity to quality.

Content providers are well positioned to combine the added-value gained by using digitised media formats with the efficiency gains of online operations. The notion of adding value however extends beyond aggregating content from different sources or repurposing content to different market tastes and needs. The quality element that is missing in most of the content currently available comes when content is enriched with specific knowledge or information that is relevant to its intended application. A new generation of Web technology - that relies on vocabularies that computers can understand as well as process - can do just this. Knowledge-enhanced digital content offers content providers the potential to extend the interoperability and augment the quality of any content-based product or service.

Quality digital content will have to meet the needs of all Europeans: citizens in society, students, researchers, business users to augment their knowledge with ease and efficiency, as well as content providers and other reusers to exploit digital content resources to create quality value-added products and services - irrespective of location or language.

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3. A changing environment


Since the launching of eContent in early 2001, the technological landscape, the legislative environment and the marketplace have seen significant developments.

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3.1. Evolving technological landscape


Internet access is in the process of being commoditised. Lower costs of hardware for data processing, transmission and storage have meant that the more cost-sensitive residential markets now account for a growing share of the initially professional and enterprise-oriented PC and Internet Service Provider markets. Online public information services for example from government agencies and health organisations are joining the ranks of specialised enterprise services.

Now that third generation mobile services are seeing deployment in Europe, mobile services based on location-sensitive content are expected to gain impetus. A range of technologies are deployed in Europe offering broadband access - the most widespread being digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modem.

The developments which have brought widespread Internet access and an abundance of digital content, also set the challenges for the future. Possibly the most important are those related to sharing, accessing and using digital content.

Fundamental to attaining the full potential of distributed systems such as the World Wide Web is the ability to combine information and functionality from different systems across different organisations, applications or platforms - interoperability. But it does not come for free: content must be enriched with metadata i that is semantically well-defined.

Content enhancement refers to making content (and service descriptions) understandable and processable by machines, by binding it to some formal and meaningful description of itself. Relevant standards, covering for instance descriptive terminology, vocabularies, ontologies i and the formats required to make these machine-processable, are about to emerge. Content enhancement requires automated or semi-automated tools, supporting the cost-effective production and maintenance of metadata and ontologies. Such tools are also about to emerge.

Metadata can cover many categories of knowledge or information, such as background, context, content type, format, language, user rights and copyright. Content enhancement can thus contribute to interoperability and quality by providing solutions to issues such as reusability, multilinguality, searchability, composability, authentication, and digital rights across distributed collections of digital content.

The systematic enhancement of content sources is one of the answers that technology provides to the users' need for quality content.

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3.2. A new legislative context


Three pieces of Community legislation constitute important progress towards providing the appropriate legal framework for the exploitation of digital content resources:

The Public Sector Information Directive i aims at stimulating cross-border re-use of public sector information by establishing the same basic market conditions for all players in the European information market in relation to its reuse. It is expected to stimulate development of Community-wide information products and services based on public sector information both by organisations with private interests and by those with public service functions.

The Commission has taken an integrated approach to the problem of public sector information. The legislative action is complemented by actions in the current eContent programme and awareness raising measures among stakeholders in the Member States via the recently established Group to Promote Digital Public Data. One of the first activities of this group has been to encourage Member States inventories of asset lists with a view to establishing European-wide inventories of public sector data.

Directive 2001/29 of 22 May 2001 on copyright and related rights in the Information Society updates the legal framework of copyright and related rights to meet the challenge of new technology and is the means by which the Community and its Member States will ratify the 1996 WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) Treaties. It harmonises certain aspects of copyright law across the Union and provides for certain public interest exceptions for the benefit of users including consumers, the libraries, educational establishments, the disabled. Directive 2001/29 will facilitate cross-border trade in goods and services protected by copyright and related rights in particular, electronic products and services.

Directive 96/9 of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases is an earlier measure which harmonises the law in relation to databases including in particular electronic and on-line databases. Directive 96/9 is the principal instrument which governs the use that may be made of electronic and on-line databases. Databases which are original within the meaning of the Directive are accorded copyright protection and other databases in which there has been substantial investment may qualify for sui generis protection. As with Directive 2001/29, there are also public interest exceptions for the benefit of certain users.

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3.3 Market developments and barriers


To date, the Internet has succeeded commercially as a distribution medium where it has been able to offer a clear added-value over existing media. The Internet's computing environment can be utilised for aggregating, customising and archiving content, for generating statistics and creating interactive content and services. Business data, corporate e-learning and online games exploit these capabilities. Though niche areas in themselves, they are relatively successful in terms of generating direct revenues. As commercial markets with vested interests from content and service providers, their development should for the most part be left to market forces.

However, commercial markets do not necessarily take care of public interests. Furthermore, the accumulation of barriers may be a disincentive for companies to invest in certain markets.

While media convergence and the global reach of the Internet have turned digital content into a potentially lucrative asset, concerns over piracy and rights management as well as uncertainty over which business models will succeed have acted as a disincentive to investment in service creation. Most affected is the entertainment sector, where these concerns between content owners, the consumer electronics industry, consumer organisations, the software industry and network operators have yet to be resolved. Until these concerns are lifted, audiovisual works would not be widely distributed over the Internet i.

In the information resources sector, such concerns are less marked. They are however replaced by a different set of problems, in particular in Europe where the conditions for their exploitation in Community-wide services fall short of being ideal. Disparities in legislation and in technical, administrative and cultural practices between Member States are compounded by the multiplicity of Community languages, all of which have a bearing on the accessibility and usability of content resources. Enlargement will pose additional challenges, increasing the number of languages and administrative cultures to be covered by content services.

The problems in establishing Community-wide products and services affect not just the producers of these services, but also negatively impact the users - organisations and individual citizens.

The availability of reliable services based on information held by public sector bodies, covering for example administrative procedures, company profiles, environmental data or meteorological information are valuable tools for companies operating in the internal market as well as for citizens. Legal uncertainty, arising from differences between Member States in the conditions for reuse of public sector information, has restricted its cross-border exploitation in products and services by private sector organisations. Added to this, the disparate practices within and between Member States in the gathering, storage, inventorying and description of public sector data imposes limitations on its interoperability across borders. And interoperability is a prerequisite for the establishment of services.

Spatial data, i.e., information that combines geographical location with other data and information are embedded in up to 80% of all the data held in public sector institutions. It can be exploited to support applications in such areas as transportation, community development, agriculture, emergency response and environmental management. It is furthermore destined to play an important role in mobile communications services. Being derived from, among others, remote sensing, mapping, and surveying technologies, spatial data is particularly vulnerable to technical fragmentation. Fragmentation holds back the growth prospects in Europe of some 6000 organisations - both public and private - that deal with spatial information.

As translation and localisation technologies have progressed, the multilingual and multicultural nature of the European market has become less of an impediment to companies who can afford the technical solutions and have a vested interest in reaching the broader market. Thus the corporate e-learning market is growing (96% per year in Europe according to IDC in 2002). It is clear however that a significant fraction of European users are missing out on developments - schoolchildren, students, researchers and private citizens - because they do not constitute a mass-market. For them, access to quality course material produced by schools and universities and access to comprehensive digital collections held by research and cultural institutions is essential.

The barriers are not only technical in nature. Legislation in one territory may allow for the free use of content for educational purposes but use of that same content, in similar contexts in other Member States may constitute copyright infringement. There is also a lack of knowledge and experience concerning the use of digital rights management systems for rights clearance; this is most pronounced in the educational sector.

Community-wide services must also take into account the multilingual and multicultural specificity of European users. The use of localisation technologies which enable cross-border aggregation and distribution of multilingual digital content is an added cost for producers. There are standards to meet the needs of users in respect of multilinguality covering learning objects, indexing and search, metadata and ontologies. Their sheer diversity however serves to act as a technical barrier. And sometimes national markets are simply too small.

So barriers not only persist, they abound.

The proposed Community intervention is therefore intended to create the conditions to overcome these barriers by focusing on methods, tools, processes and services related to the design, development, access and distribution of high quality digital content, while leaving the actual production of digital content to the market forces and, where appropriate, to other specific Community initiatives.

6.

4. eContent: what challenges remain?


The current proposal constitutes a follow-on from the eContent Programme which runs for a 4 year period from January 2001. The Communication from the Commission i to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions concerning the mid-term evaluation of the eContent programme has been quite positive and has recommended a follow-up programme characterised by a somewhat narrower scope and tighter focus in order to optimise the impact. The main recommendations, which were also highlighted in the findings of a number of specific consultations held with relevant stakeholders (namely those related to definition of the eContent workprogramme as well as meetings of the eContent programme management Committee, the Digital Public Data Group and other specific meetings organised by Commission Services) are summarised below :

First, tackling the problem of cross border information supply based on the use of public sector information is an area where the EU can add substantial value. The attention given to the use of metadata should be reinforced. The effective use of technology in optimising economic viability over the longer term is an issue that organisations in this still young market will have to confront.

Second, the problem of localisation of content - dealt with by eContent as a separate issue - should be embedded in all services that claim a European dimension. Localisation technologies and the use of appropriate open standards, now wider spread in commercial markets, should be deployed for societal benefit in areas such as educational, cultural and scholarly content. However, although localisation technologies are of key importance, the programme emphasises that in order to design and deliver quality multilingual and multicultural content, these aspects need to be taken into account from the very start of the process, keeping in mind the requirements of the different target groups and markets.

Third, eContent has catalysed the collaboration of a high number of market players to realise a number of projects that would not have been realised otherwise with the same depth or breadth i.

The main shortcoming of eContent was to address a too large constituency, thereby lacking focus. Hence, dropping some areas of support, e.g. bridging the financing gap for content firms, and focussing on a limited number of types of content becomes a necessity. The Commission has already started to redress this problem when establishing the 2003-2004 workprogramme for eContent.

What follows aims at creating conditions for broader access to and use of digital content and where necessary for greater economic return from new content-based services. The intention is to leverage investment in development and to broaden the offering of quality content-based services, facilitating the diffusion of knowledge and dissemination of information.

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5. The follow-up programme - proposed priorities


8.

5.1. Objectives and focus


In order to address the challenges posed, it is proposed to adopt a financial support programme with the overall objective: to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable, facilitating the creation and diffusion of information and knowledge- in areas of public interest - at the Union level. The programme will contribute to the Lisbon strategy and strengthen European competitiveness in the knowledge economy. The programme focuses on the end-user - be it the citizen in society, the student, the researcher, business user wishing to augment their knowledge, or the reuser wishing to enhance and exploit digital content resources for economic return. It should broaden user choice and help stakeholders to reap the benefits that knowledge-enhanced digital content can offer.

Its overall emphasis is on quality content that serves to disperse information and diffuse knowledge, and not just more content. The use of metadata to enhance the content itself is considered as essential element to guarantee interactivity, re-usability and interoperability of content. Knowledge enhancement will facilitate the creation of dynamic content, tailored to specific contexts (learning, culture, etc).

The social context targets domains where market forces are not sufficient to ensure that citizens and user organisations in the Union can benefit from content offerings made accessible by the latest technologies. The aim is to facilitate broader availability of reusable and interoperable quality content for service creation. It covers areas of public interest such as public sector information, learning content, scientific and scholarly content, and content from cultural institutions.

The economic context aims to help establish conditions for greater economic return from content-based services. A special emphasis will be on spatial data addressing interoperability issues - a particularly acute problem because the collection of spatial data is technology dependent (eg: via sensors) and done at a regional level. This will extend to location-based (mobile) services using spatial data, as well as services based on a combination of spatial data with other information.

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5.2. Implementation


The programme envisages three operational goals:

* Facilitating access to European Digital Content

* Improving quality by facilitating best practice related to digital content

* Reinforcing co-operation and awareness between digital content stakeholders

The programme will finance projects designed to improve tools, processes and services related to the production, access, use and distribution of digital content. Where digital content involves personal data, Directives 95/46/EC and 2002/58/EC should be adhered to. The programme will facilitate the transfer of knowledge, experiences and good practices; co-ordination activities; cross-fertilisation between content sectors, content providers and users. To this end, the programme encompasses the use of best practice actions normally conducted in thematic clusters as well as thematic networks bringing together a variety of stakeholders around a given technological and organisational objective.

The overriding principle of the programme is to maximise the impact on a group of actors beyond the participants of the programme. A tighter focus in terms of participants as well as objectives should help achieve this.

The financial envelope for the implementation of the programme is proposed to be EUR 163 million covering a period of 4 years (2005-2008).

Specifically, the activities of the programme will support the emergence of pan-European frameworks (services, information infrastructures, etc.) facilitating discovery of and access to digital content in Europe, the creation of new content--based services and their organisational underpinnings. A series of experiments will showcase how semantically well-defined metadata can improve usability and reusability, searchability and interoperability of digital content in multilingual and multicultural environments. Where digital content involves personal data, the technologies used should be privacy-compliant and, where possible, privacy-enhancing. Target areas will be public sector information, spatial data, learning and cultural content.

Fostering the organisational frameworks to ease access to digital resources and showcasing the best use of technologies for their exploitation will lower the perceived risk for organisations and thus create a better environment for investment and innovation in digital content.

New generations of technologies are designed to deliver greater functionality, greater economy or both to those who use them. Effective use of the latest technologies in their products and service offerings can give companies a decisive competitive edge over those who rely on older generations, particularly in today's global economy.

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5.3. Links with other Community programmes


There are links with Community Research and Technological Development (RTD) programmes, notably in the field of semantic knowledge technologies, technology-enhanced learning and access to cultural heritage, as well as links to a number of non-research programmes. The latter include the Interchange of Data between Administrations Programme (IDA), encouraging interoperability in terms of the content of the information which is exchanged within and across administrative sectors and with the private sector. To achieve these aims several initiatives have been carried out in the areas of the metadata and content interoperability, including a Commission staff working paper on interoperability i, and the development of the European Interoperability Framework.

Other relevant non-research programmes include certain Community programmes for culture and education (MEDIA, Socrates-Minerva and Leonardo da Vinci programmes and the proposed eLearning programme) as well as other initiatives for the development of interoperable metadata standards.

The proposed activities build, partly, upon results achieved in RTD programmes, and will take into account actions launched under other programmes and initiatives, such as those on quality in e-learning, to avoid duplication and maximising impact. They complement, in parts, activities in IDA. IDA is addressing interoperability of government services whilst eContentplus draws on public sector information in order to enable commercial reuse.

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6. Conclusion


The stage has now been set in Europe to exploit vigorously the untapped potential of digital content.

It is these elements combined - making the best use of technology in providing access to information and knowledge for all, and generating better conditions for European-wide investment by companies - that will assure Europe a place at the head of the knowledge economy.