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OpenProductions is a trustworthy AI system that integrates various open knowledge bases and open-source solutions. These components are at various technical readiness levels, with some of them already passing scientific peer-review and extensive software tests. These modules can be used with GNU-3 or MIT licenses without any warranty. To produce cost reports, ESG reports or improve your rights management documentation please contact us.

ImpactFest Roundabout: ESRS Reporting Standards

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 19:48:00 +0100

Daniel Antal, the co-founder of Reprex, moderated a roundabout with experts on the 8th ImpactFest about the problems around the introduction of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).

What is ImpactFest?

ImpactFest is the leading impact event. The eighth edition of ImpactFest took place in the Fokker Terminal in The Hague.

ESRS

The European Union’s revolutionary new integrated financial and sustainability reporting system will be introduced for about 4100 companies in the Netherlands and about 50,000 companies in the entire EU in 2024/25. Companies will have to connect the environmental and social impact measures of their economic activities with their financial accounting system and with the data system of their suppliers and buyers. In effect, they must be able to report on the whole lifecycle of a product or service.

Daniel Antal started with their own subjective mindmap of the introduction of ESRS, aligning some positive thoughts on the left-hand side and sceptical ones on the right-hand side.

Our Roundabout

Not revealing this mindmap above, the expert participants in the Roundabout engaged in a structured conversation, bringing questions and thoughts from their practice in sustainability consulting (with a social sustainability focus), university research (with a carbon focus) and application development for reporting.

Mindmapping our understanding of the opportunities and problems with the introduction of ESRS from next year.

The shared view on the introduction of ESRS and, generally, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) was that even though just in the Netherlands more than 4000 companies are expected to apply these standards directly from the 2024 business year, and tens of thousands of SMEs in the supply chain will need to supply structured data, there is a very low level of understanding on the requirements. Companies hope that their accountant, auditor, or sustainability consultant will develop a magic tool that will be installed as a plug-in to their ERP system, and it will solve the problem.

Such a magic bullet that will hit all requirements with one shot, of course, does not exist. The aim of any ESG reporting is not to produce a report but to focus the management’s attention on reducing harmful impacts and increasing beneficial impacts on their stakeholders, users, and the broader environment they work in.

At the end of the conversation, we were making educated guesses about how various corporate leaders, including CFOs and heads of HR, will be involved in the process.

Reprex is developing an intelligent, semantic model to connect data in the financial bookkeeping of companies with reliable scientific benchmarks and data sources for benchmarking and target setting and with harmonised survey data for the supply chain data. Our OpenProduction tool prepares such data integration in film and music production. It utilises various OSSH (open source software and hardware) solutions to provide necessary upgrades for ERP systems or to support suppliers to produce information for their corporate buyers, donors for banks and insurance companies in a trustworthy and cost-effective way.

Based on the success of this Roundabout, we will organise short meetups where experts and practitioners can exchange professional views in an informal setting. We’ll set up such meetings in The Hague, Amsterdam and Brussels in the near future. Interested? Get in touch and we will send you a Doodle about possible dates.

Reprex Wins Audience Prize in The Hague Innovators Challenge

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 18:00:00 +0100

Reprex won the Audience Prize in The Hague Innovators Challenge - with about as many votes as the 7 other contenters combined. We really wanted to prove that big data can work for small organizations, too.

Congratulations for WECO for the startup prize, and our partners, BeeSage, for the pre-startup price. You will hear from BeeSage and Reprex more in the near future.

The winners of our yearly The Hague Innovators challenge are announced! These three startups are shaking up their industry:
1. #WECO
2. #Beesage
3. #Reprex
Congratulations to all of them! 🎉#doinggoodanddoingbusiness #TheHagueInnovators pic.twitter.com/GnRdjRrL5P
— ImpactCity (@impactcity) November 15, 2022

Dutch AI Coalition Working Group Culture and Media

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 19:30:00 +0200

Reprex presented its Digital Music Observatory and Cultural Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory as platforms for developing and evaluating trustworthy AI in the cultural domains. We hope to find new partners within the NLAIC community to join our open, collaborative projects.

We have reviewed more than 80 data observatories in the world, and we are building five modern ones.

It was particularly important for us to get away from the Hague, and meet organizations like DEN and the KB to find out how our ambitious plans could connect to their excellent work. Reprex is a finalist in the Hague Innovators Challenge 2022, and we would like to bring at least one global observatory, the planned European Music Observatory, into our beautiful and smart city. While knowledge graphs are virtual and live in the web 3.0, the Dutch AI Coalition and the country’s future competitiveness need to ensure that essential knowledge graphs will be managed by the ecosystem of Netherlands-based researchers, institutions, and startups. The ethical consciousness shown by the members of our Culture AI Lab shows that it is probably the best for future human generations globally, too.

The SABIO is one of the most interesting in the world and couuld be connected easily with our Cultural Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory prototype.

The Culture AI Lab presented a handful of very interesting, ethical and interesting projects. Pressing Matter responds to growing concerns in the Netherlands and Europe about how to deal with the legacies of colonialism in museums and builds innovative tools for museums (and broader society) to address the question of ownership of objects collected in the colonial period. Dr Emily Hansell Clark, former editor of our Data&Lyrics blog, presented the Polyvocal Interpretation of Contested Colonial Heritage project.

Both projects are conceptually and technologically relevant to our Listen Local project. Our project aims to prevent the colonization or start the de-colonization of the local music ecosystem and make local artists of Utrecht, Vilnius, or Sarajevo visible and audible in their own cities’ public spaces or on the smartphones of their town.

The most compelling use case of Listen Local project is finding out why music recommender systems do not recommend some music at all. Or why is it so hard to connect Utrecht-based artists with fans living or visiting Utrecht on the Spotify or YouTube platform? The Responsible Recommenders in the Public Library Sector is looking for similar answers for librarians to avoid all recommendations to visitors pointing to U.S. authors and publishers.

Savvina Daniil’s excellent presentation raised very similar questions to our Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad.

Our deep dive into legislative and regulatory issues of AI highlighted that the past decade unleashed global web-based tools that have the potential to undermine our democratic and cultural cohesion. Reassuringly, we have seen that our thinking about the dangers of AI on European culture and the technological solutions to combat them are very widely shared by NLAIC Culture and Media members. We hope that our partners’ policy work in the Digital Music Observatory and our forming new observatories will support policy design and decision-making that will protect the Netherlands and the EU from some of these threats.

Learn more about the Dutch AI Coalition’s Cultur and Media Working Group (in Dutch:)

Developing a software-as-service solution for micro-, and small enterprises

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 09:40:00 +0100

The music sector must increase its environmental and social (ESG) sustainability management to meet the challenges of the climate emergency and to make the music sector a fairer, more just workplace for womxn and artists coming from minorities, small countries. The European Union will make target setting and audited reporting mandatory in environmental and social sustainability for large companies. The application of these new accounting, reporting and disclosure rules are optional for the music sector where almost all entities are micro-, or small enterprises and civil society organizations.

Even if music organizations are not pushed by regulators to adopt these new standards, it is in their best interest to take the initiative on the principle of subsidiarty, and develop tools that can be applied as an extension to their simplified financial and tax reporting. Music organizations and businesses that can prove that they are making progress in reducing their carbon footprint, making their water use more sustainable, and they provide equal opportunities for womxn, they will be eligible for new, green bank and insurance products (which are particularly important in live music) and can attract new sponsors and donors.

Compliance with these new rules is very costly, because tools are being developed for stock-exchange listed big companies and financial institutions. The Commission’s impact assessment (SWD/2021/150 final) estimates the cost of compliance with the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive exceeding 4 bn euros for the European companies or around 10,000 euros per company. Reprex, working together with large accounting, audit and value-based banking partners, scientific, research and industry partners in the Digital Music Observatory open knowledge collaboration, hopes to bring down this cost below 500 euros, which will immediately pay off when a music organization receives green money.

We are working on a simple interface that can connect the accounting system of micro and small enterprises with new methodologies, starting with greenhouse gas reporting with Reprex’s open source EEIO application iotables. We will keep many aspects of our software and data solution open, so that later methodological innovations and scientific achievements can be easily incorporated into the system. Reprex’s minimum viable product will be created in four iteration rounds in Malta, Czechia, Bulgaria and Belgium. However, our testing is open for any amount of donations to any music entities in the European Union who can provide input data in English or Dutch, or be able to pay for their translation and localization costs.

Link: Final List of Awareded Projects by MusicAIRE

The Data Sisyphus

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Sisyphus was punished by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. This is the price that project managers and analysts pay for the inadequate documentation of their data assets.

When was a file downloaded from the internet? What happened with it sense? Are their updates? Did the bibliographical reference was made for quotations? Missing values imputed? Currency translated? Who knows about it – who created a dataset, who contributed to it? Which is an intermediate format of a spreadsheet file, and which is the final, checked, approved by a senior manager?

Big data creates inequality and injustice. On aspect of this inequality is the cost of data processing and documentation – a greatly underestimated, and usually not reported cost item. In small organizations, where there are no separate data science and data engineering roles, data is usually supposed to be processed and documented by (junior) analysts or researchers. This a very important source of the gap between Big Tech and them: the data usually ends up very expensive, ill-formatted, not readable by computers that use machine learning and AI. Usually the documentation steps are completely omitted.

“Data is potential information, analogous to potential energy: work is required to release it.” – Jeffrey Pomerantz

Metadata, which is information about the history of the data, and information how it can be technically and legally reused, has a hidden cost. Cheap or low-quality external data comes with poor or no metadata, and small organizations lack the resources to add high-quality metadata to their datasets. However, this only perpetuates the problem.

The hidden cost item behind the unbillable hours

As we have shown with our research partners, such metadata problems are not unique to data analysis. Independent artists and small labels are suffering on music or book sales platforms, because their copyrighted content is not well documented. If you automatically document tens of thousands of songs or datasets, the documentation cost is very small per item. If you, do it manually, the cost may be higher than the expected revenue from the song, or the total cost of the dataset itself. (See our research consortiums’ preprint paper: Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies)

In the short run, small consultancies, NGOs, or as a matter of fact, musicians, seem to logically give up on high-quality documentation and logging. In the long run, this has two devastating consequences: computers, such as machine learning algorithms cannot read their documents, data, songs. And as memory fades, the ill-documented resources need to be re-created, re-checked, reformatted. Often, they are even hard to find on your internal server or laptop archive.

Metadata is a hidden destroyer of the competitiveness of corporate or academic research, or independent content management. It never quoted on external data vendor invoices, it is not planned as a cost item, because metadata, the description of a dataset, a document, a presentation, or song, is meaningless without the resource that it describes. You never buy metadata. But if your dataset comes without proper metadata documentation, you are bound, like Sisyphus, to search for it, to re-arrange it, to check its currency units, its digits, its formatting. Data analysts are reported to spend about 80% of their working hours on data processing and not data analysis – partly, because data processing is a very laborious task that can be done by computers at a scale far cheaper, and partly because they do not know if the person who sat before them at the same desk has already performed these tasks, or if the person responsible for quality control checked for errors.

Uncut diamonds need to be cut, polished, and you have to make sure that they come from a legal source. Data is similar: it needs to be tidied up, checked and documented before use. Photo: Dave Fischer.

Undocumented data is hardly informative – it may be a page in a book, a file in an obsolete file format on a governmental server, an Excel sheet that you do not remember to have checked for updates. Most data are useless, because we do not know how it can inform us, or we do not know if we can trust it. The processing can be a daunting task, not to mention the most boring and often neglected documentation duties after the dataset is final and pronounced error-free by the person in charge of quality control.

Our observatory automatically processes and documents the data

The good news about documentation and data validation costs is that they can be shared. If many users need GDP/capita data from all over the world in euros, then it is enough if only one entity, a data observatory, collects all GDP and population data expresed in dollars, korunas, and euros, and makes sure that the latest data is correctly translated to euros, and then correctly divided by the latest population figures. These task are error-prone,and should not be repeaeted by every data journalist, NGO employee, PhD student or junior analyst. This is one of the services of our data observatory.

The tidy data format means that the data has a uniform and clear data structure and semantics, therefore it can be automatically validated for many common errors and can be automatically documented by either our software or any other professional data science application. It is not as strict as the schema for a relational database, but it is strict enough to make, among other things, importing into a database easy.
The descriptive metadata contains information on how to find the data, access the data, join it with other data (interoperability) and use it, and reuse it, even years from now. Among others, it contains file format information and intellectual property rights information.
The processing metadata makes the data usable in strictly regulated professional environments, such as in public administration, law firms, investment consultancies, or in scientific research. We give you the entire processing history of the data, which makes peer-review or external audit much easier and cheaper.
The authoritative copy is held at an independent repository, it has a globally unique identifier that protects you from accidental data loss, mixing up with unfinished an untested version.

Cutting the dataset to a format with clear semantics and documenting it with the FAIR metadata concep exponentially increases the value of data. It can be publisehd or sold at a premium. Photo: Andere Andre.

While humans are much better at analysing the information and human agency is required for trustworthy AI, computers are much better at processing and documenting data. We apply to important concepts to our data service: we always process the data to the tidy format, we create an authoritative copy, and we always automatically add descriptive and processing metadata.

The value of metadata

Metadata is often more valuable and more costly to make than the data itself, yet it remains an elusive concept for senior or financial management. Metadata is information about how to correctly use the data and has no value without the data itself. Data acquisition, such as buying from a data vendor, or paying an opinion polling company, or external data consultants appears among the material costs, but metadata is never sold alone, and you do not see its cost.

In most cases, the reason why there is no gold rush for open data is that fact that while the EU member states release billions of euros’ worth data for free, or at very low cost, annually, it comes without proper metadata.

Data-as-Service

Reusable, legal, easy-to-import, interoperable, always fresh data in tidy formats with a modern API. Photo: Edgar Soto.

If the data source is cheap or has a low quality, you do not even get it. If you do not have it, it will show up as a human resource cost in research (when your analysist or junior researcher are spending countless hours to find out the missing metadata information on the correct use of the data) or in sales costs (when you try to reuse a research, consulting or legal product and you have comb through your archive and retest elements again and again.)

The data, together with the descriptive and administrative metadata, and links to the use license and the authoritative copy can be found in our API. Try it out!