EUROPEAN COMMISSION Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology Media and Data Creativity Ref. Ares(2016)7276-04/01/2016 IMPLEMENTATION OF THE COMMISSION RECOMMENDATION ON DIGITISATION AND ONLINE ACCESSIBILITY OF CULTURAL MATERIAL AND DIGITAL PRESERVATION PROGRESS REPORT 2013-2015 Please complete and return by e-mail to Rachel.Soucher@ec.europa.eu no later than 30 October 2015 European Commission, 2920 Luxembourg, LUXEMBOURG - Tel. +352 43011, E-Mail: CNECT-G2@ec.europa.eu
Country GREECE Contact Details (info will not be published): Name Stefanos Kollias 1 George Bolanis 2 Organisation NTUA 1 NMC 2 Telephone 00306977477162 1 00306995010950 2 Email stefanos@cs.ntua.gr gbolanis@gmail.com NOTE: This template follows the structure of the Recommendation of 27 October 2011 on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. This template should be strictly followed. The Commission Recommendation was endorsed by Council on its Conclusion of 12 May 2012. The priority actions and indicative timetable contained in these Conclusions should clearly be taken into account in your reporting of progress. Please note that your report should focus on new developments in the reference period 2013-2015. Please use the empty boxes underneath the questions to indicate your response/comments. Besides your factual report, you are encouraged to raise any implementation problems or highlight any best practice examples to which you think special attention should be paid at national and/or European level. Where implementation is not fully reached, please describe how you plan to continue your work. Please provide quantitative indicators on progress achieved, where applicable. If no information is available for a question, please leave the corresponding box empty. All reports will be published on the Commission's Digital Agenda for Europe website. 2
DIGITISATION: ORGANISATION AND FUNDING 1. PROGRESS ON PLANNING AND MONITORING THE DIGITISATION OF BOOKS, JOURNALS, NEWSPAPERS, PHOTOGRAPHS, MUSEUM OBJECTS, ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTS, SOUND AND AUDIO-VISUAL MATERIAL, MONUMENTS AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES ("CULTURAL MATERIAL") a. Setting clear quantitative targets for the digitisation of cultural material, in line with the overall targets mentioned under point 7, indicating the expected increase in digitised material in Europeana and the budgets allocated by public authorities - Is a national strategy or other scheme in place for planning the digitisation of cultural material? [ X ] National strategy [ X ] National funding programme [ ] Domain specific initiatives [ ] Regional schemes [ ] No specific scheme [ ] Other Please provide details of the present scheme, and any developments since the last reporting period. Digitisation of cultural material at national level has been funded by the National Pogramme for Digital Convergence 2007-2013. A variety of projects, involving more than 300 Cultural Organisations, have been implemented in this framework. The Hellenic Ministry of Culture has been responsible for planning in the framework of the Digital Converence Programme the digitisation and cultural developments especially related to the fields of museums, ancient monuments, contemporary art. The Secretariat General of Information and Communication has recently taken the lead in the field of audiovisual content & audiovisual archives. The Greek Government has created the Hellenic Center of Audiovisual Media (EKOME) which covers the areas that have been inactive after the closure of the Hellenic National Audiovisual Archive and the Institute of Audiovisual Media, back in 2012. Its areas of priority cover: a) digitization and digital preservation especially for audiovisual cultural material, b) meeting standards and taking advantage of all possible strategic and practical ways and methods set by Europeana, c) establishment and development of synergies and organizational rules for all audiovisual related activities and productions, d) relevant legal deposit actions, e) national policies, best practices and synergies of all kinds, f) best use and further development of heritage projects in continuation of HeNAA and IOM practices, g) taking advantage of structural funds in the area of culture, mainly to establish a high level production line that will offer services to users all over the world, h) any other action promoting & advancing audiovisual repositorial activity. 3
- Are quantitative targets for the digitisation of cultural material set at national level? Please provide details for the reference period 2013-2015 including any available figures on digitisation targets and allocated budgets/budget sources. Three Calls have been issued by the National Operational Programme for Digital Convergence in the former reporting period (until 2013) with a funding of about 100 MEuro. A variety of projects including digitisation & annotation tasks have been implemented in this framework, most of which are being completed by the end of 2015. Quantitative targets have been set for each project in this framework. 520.000 digital cultural objects have been generated and uploaded to Europeana until the beginning of October 2015. The goal of 618.000 objects set up by the EC has been overcome by the end of December 2015. As an example, the Archaeological Company in Athens have completed a national project digitising and annotating 50K photographs, 30K designs, 230K pages of books, diaries, papers, annotated using a variant of the IST Carare project metadata schema. Particular interest has been given by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture to ancient monuments and to mobile cultural objects. A specific project being implemented has focused on land registry and associated information generation for about 30.000 archaeological sites all around Greece. Moreover, about 500.000 mobile objects belonging to the Efories of Ancient Monuments are being digitised in another project. - Are qualitative targets for the digitisation of cultural material set at national level? Please provide details of any present standards or guidelines, and any developments since the last reporting period. The National Documentation Centre has been given by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture an aggregator and validator role for Cultural organizations that are beneficiaries of the recent Digital Convergence Operational Programme Calls. As such, they have developed a work flow for digital content produced with public funding to be quality controlled, aggregated to a single infrastructure for the public to use and preserved for the future. First, through an invisible Harvester, data have to pass interoperability Validation, based on automatic checks. If their data complies with the interoperability and open data requirements set within the framework of the Calls, their data is then aggregated and available for the public to search and retrieve through a central portal. Finally, the validated and aggregated content is stored in the Preservator, for long-term safe keeping. In particular, the Validator tool performs automated checks for compliance with the wide-spread international data and system standards defined in the Call, as well as Europeana. b. Creating overviews of digitised cultural material and contributing to collaborative efforts to establish an overview at European level - Is a national scheme or mechanism in place for monitoring the digitisation of cultural material? 4
Yes [ X ] No [ ] If yes, please provide details. For the last two Calls of the Digital Convergence Operational Programme, the National Documentation Centre assists the Hellenic Ministry of Culture in this context, as was above described. Plans for providing such overviews in the following period are currently made by the Secretariat General of Information and Communication. - Has your country encouraged and supported the participation of cultural institutions to the ENUMERATE surveys for the establishment of a Europeanlevel overview of digitisation data? Please provide details of actions within this reporting period, any related figures, and/or plans to support contribution in upcoming surveys. Greece has encouraged the participation of cultural institutions to the Enumerate surveys; as a consequence, there has been very satisfactory participation of institutions in the former surveys, especially if one considers the difficult financial situation. There is no specific plan for supporting contribution in upcoming surveys yet. 2. PROGRESS ON PARTNERSHIPS BETWEEN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR IN ORDER TO CREATE NEW WAYS OF FUNDING DIGITISATION OF CULTURAL MATERIAL AND TO STIMULATE INNOVATIVE USES OF THE MATERIAL, WHILE ENSURING THAT PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS FOR DIGITISATION ARE FAIR AND BALANCED, AND IN LINE WITH THE CONDITIONS INDICATED IN ANNEX I - Have cultural institutions in your country entered into PPPs (including also partnerships with non-eu partners) for digitisation or for facilitating the access to digital cultural heritage? Yes [ ] No [ X ] Please provide details of any major partnerships established since the last reporting period, compliance of the respective agreements with the conditions in Annex I of the Recommendation as well as contact details of the cultural institution involved. There have not been any major partnerships between cultural institutions and the private sector (including non-eu partners) since the last reporting period. There have been some private companies specialising in digitisation activities in the last decade, which participate in the above mentioned Calls and undertake the digitisation, annotation, portal and services generation tasks for the cultural institutions involved in the Calls. 5
3. PROGRESS ON MAKING USE OF STRUCTURAL FUNDS, WHERE POSSIBLE, TO CO- FINANCE DIGITISATION ACTIVITIES - Is your country using, or planning to use, funding from the European Structural and Investment Funds for the period 2014-2020 for the digitisation of cultural material? Yes [ X ] No [ ] If yes, please provide details of specific programmes, or large-scale projects, and respective amounts. Some major digitisation activities of the current period that have not been completed by the end of 2015 are being extended in the first semester(s) of 2016. The specific plans of usage of the European Structural and Investment Funds for the period starting in 2016 are currently developed and will be announced in the forthcoming month(s). 4. PROGRESS ON WAYS TO OPTIMISE THE USE OF DIGITISATION CAPACITY AND ACHIEVE ECONOMIES OF SCALE, WHICH MAY IMPLY THE POOLING OF DIGITISATION EFFORTS BY CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND CROSS-BORDER COLLABORATION, BUILDING ON COMPETENCE CENTRES FOR DIGITISATION IN EUROPE. - Has your country developed ways to optimise the use of digitisation capacity and achieve economies of scale, through pooling of digitisation efforts or cross-border collaboration? Yes [ ] No [ X ] Please provide details of any developments or best practice examples of national, or cross-border, collaboration within this reporting period. Not yet. 6
DIGITISATION AND ONLINE ACCESSIBILITY OF PUBLIC DOMAIN MATERIAL 5. PROGRESS ON IMPROVING ACCESS TO AND USE OF DIGITISED CULTURAL MATERIAL THAT IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN a. Ensuring that material in the public domain remains in the public domain after digitisation - -Has your country encountered obstacles in the process of ensuring that material in the public domain stays in the public domain after digitisation? How do cultural institutions in your country take up the Europeana Public Domain Charter? Please provide details of the present situation and any developments within this reporting period. This has been set as an obligation of all funded Cultural Organisations by the Digital Convergence Programme. b. Promoting the widest possible access to digitised public domain material as well as the widest possible reuse of the material for non-commercial and commercial purposes - Are there projects or schemes for promoting the widest possible access to and reuse of digitised public domain material? Please provide details of any developments within this reporting period. Attempts have been made, through specific projects, to re-use such material mainly for education and tourism. - What experience has your country been able to gather concerning the re-use of digitised public domain material for non-commercial or commercial purposes? Please provide details of any best practice examples within this reporting period. Please also indicate whether there are mechanisms for monitoring such reuse (take-up by organisations engaging in re-use and take-up by endusers/visitors). There is no widely gathered such experience yet. Similarly, no such mechanisms exist yet. c. Taking measures to limit the use of intrusive watermarks or other visual protection measures that reduce the usability of the digitised public domain material. - Are measures to limit the use of watermarks or other visual protection measures reducing the usability of digitised public domain material in place? 7
Yes [ ] No [ X ] Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period.. Where applicable, please also indicate best/worst practice examples. There has been an attempt to reduce the area that watermarks cover in digitised images, freely provided (at JPEG image format) in cultural organisation portals, so that the details of the presented content are not severely hidden. DIGITISATION AND ONLINE ACCESSIBILITY OF IN- COPYRIGHT MATERIAL 6. IMPROVE CONDITIONS FOR THE DIGITISATION AND ONLINE ACCESSIBILITY OF IN- COPYRIGHT MATERIAL. a. Rapid and correct transposition and implementation of the provisions of the Directive on orphan works - Has your country adopted legislation to transpose the Directive on orphan works? Yes [ ] No [ X ] Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period. As mentioned in the last report, there is a draft bill for the amendment of Law 2121/1993 (Copyright Act), with a provision regulating the orphan works. b. Legal framework conditions to underpin licensing mechanisms identified and agreed by stake-holders for the large-scale digitisation and cross-border accessibility of works that are out-of commerce. - Are there any legal/voluntary stakeholder-driven schemes in your country to underpin the large- scale digitisation and cross-border accessibility of out-ofcommerce works? Yes [ ] No [ X ] Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period (including schemes, references and impact). No changes. 8
c. Contributing to and promoting the availability of databases with rights information, connected at the European level, such as ARROW. - Is your country contributing and promoting the availability of such databases at the European level? Yes [ ] No [ X ] Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period. Not yet. EUROPEANA 7. PROGRESS ON CONTRIBUTION TO THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPEANA a. Encouraging cultural institutions as well as publishers and other right holders to make their digitised material accessible through Europeana, thus helping the platform to give direct access to 30 million digitised objects by 2015, including two million sound or audio-visual objects - Please provide details of any developments, or best practice examples, within this reporting period. Compliance to Europeana has been included, as a prerequisite for digitisation and annotation project developments acceptance, in all Digital Convergence Operational Programme Calls. Moreover, participation of many Greek research, educational, cultural and private organisations in Europeana projects developments and the related dissemination activities, together with the large usage of national structural funds for cultural content digitisation in the 2007-2015 periods, have generated a great interest in Greek Cultural Institutions for Europeana and Europeana developments. This is the reason, why, despite the difficult financial situation in Greece the last few years, the contribution of Hellenic content to Europeana has been very satisfactory. - Please provide figures concerning the contribution of your country to Europeana with regards to the indicative targets for minimum content contribution by 2015, as set at Annex II of the Recommendation. According to information provided by Europeana in the end of September 2015, 518.000 cultural objects were searchable through the Europeana portal. According to the Recommendation, the target for Greece in the end of 2015 has been 618.000 cultural objects. Since most of the projects executed under the Digital Convergence Operational Programme are ending in December 2015, it is estimated that this target will be greatly overcome in the end of 2015 beginning of 2016. This can be certified if one reads the volumes of content currently being generated in the 9
archaeological sector, mentioned in section 1 of this Report. It can be reported that in 2015, 10 Hellenic Organisations participated in 14 Europeana projects: National Technical University of Athens (12 projects), Athena Research Institute (3 projects), University of Patra (2 projects), the Postcriptum company (2 projects) and in one project each, the General State Archives, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, the Hellenic Ministry of Education, the National Research Center, the Lilian Voudouri Organisation, the Stegi for Education and Arts, and the Peloponese Folkrole Organisation B. Papantoniou. Statistically there have been about 30K visits to Hellenic digital content through the Europeana portal in the first semester of 2014. This number was raised to 35K in the first semester of 2015. A 73% of the searches was in Greek, with a 24% being in English. - Are there known obstacles that have prevented your country from reaching the indicative targets for 2015? (if relevant) No. b. Making all public funding for future digitisation projects conditional on the accessibility of the digitised material through Europeana. - Please provide details of any steps taken, or best practice examples, within this reporting period. As mentioned in section 1, public funding for digitisation projects was conditional on the accessibility of the digitised material, appropriately validated w.r.t. international standards and Europeana metadata standards. c. Ensuring that all their public domain masterpieces will be accessible through Europeana by 2015, - Please provide details of any steps taken, or best practice examples, within this reporting period. All major Cultural Organisations have included their masterpieces in the material digitised through public funding; consequently this content is available to Europeana. This is also the case with Europeana 280, where all provided Hellenic masterpieces have been accessible through Europeana as well. 10
d. Setting up or reinforcing national aggregators bringing content from different domains into Europeana, and contributing to cross-border aggregators in specific domains or for specific topics, which may bring about economies of scale - Is a national aggregator bringing content from different domains into Europeana present in your country? Yes [ ] No [ X ] - Please provide details of any developments, within this reporting period, concerning national aggregators, participating organisations and content domains covered. The recently established Hellenic Center of Audiovisual Media (EKOME), as mentioned in section 1, aims at taking the role of national aggregator in cultural content, with emphasis on audiovisual material. - Please provide details of any developments or best practice examples, within this reporting period, concerning contribution to cross-border aggregators in specific domain or for specific topics. The National Technical University of Athens have developed the MINT platform for content generation interoperability within European projects; MINT has been used in more than 20 Europeana projects, as well as by Europeana in their ingestion procedure. Currently this is also used by the CEF Europeana Digital Service Infrastructure in the fields of museums (MUSEO), Audiovisual (EU- Screen), Fashion and archaeology (Carare). The Athena Research Centre have developed and used the MORE Repository for cultural content, especially in the field of archaeology and in small cultural collection creation, in projects such as Carare, 3-D Icons and in Europeana DSI. NTUA have been developing a new platform for semantic content search, aggregation and personalised usage within Europeana projects (EU-Screen XL, EU-Sounds, E-Space). e. Ensuring the use of common digitisation standards defined by Europeana in collaboration with the cultural institutions in order to achieve interoperability of the digitised material at European level, as well as the systematic use of permanent identifiers - Please provide details of any steps taken, or best practice examples, within this reporting period, to ensure the use of common digitisation and metadata standards to achieve interoperability at European level. As mentioned in section 1, the Digital Convergence Operational Programme has adopted a validation procedure, executed by the National Documentation Centre, for the generated digital content according to the following tests: a) can they be published as linked open data, b) is the repository interoperable, c) do they use 11
persistent identifiers, d) do they use metadata standards, e) are metadata semantically compliant, f) are PDFs OCRed, g) is the image quality good. Moreover, in many cases, Cultural Institutes collaborate with research organisations that participate in Europeana projects and are advised by them on using Europeana adopted metadata schemata (such as EDM). In the above mentioned case of the Archaeological Company in Athens, the National Technical University of Athens has advised them so that they have adopted the Carare metadata schema for annotating archaeological monuments. - Please provide details of any developments or best practice examples, within this reporting period, concerning the systematic use of permanent identifiers. Please see former comment. f. Ensuring the wide and free availability of existing metadata (descriptions of digital objects) produced by cultural institutions, for reuse through services such as Europeana and for innovative applications - Which steps has your country taken to ensure the free availability of existing metadata? How do cultural institutions in your country take up the Europeana Data Exchange Agreement? Please provide details of any developments or best practice examples, within this reporting period. Cultural Institutions that provide content to Europeana, mainly through different thematic aggregators, sign the Europeana Data Exchange Agreement. In many cases, not all annotations are presented to the public. For example, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture have selected a subset of the generated metadata that is publicly available and re-usable, while the rest are provided in smaller certified user groups, such as archaeologists and researchers. - What experience has your country been able to gather concerning the re-use of free metadata, through services such as Europeana or for innovative applications? Please provide details of any best practice examples within this reporting period. Greek organisations that participate in Europeana projects have been able to provide, share and re-use free metadata generated in these projects, and furthermore, to enrich the Hellenic cultural content with searchable data and information provided by Europeana, DPLA and other content aggregators. Moreover, in the reporting period, the Greek General Secretariat for Research and Technology has funded DYAS/ Dariah-GR, as a Research Infrastructure for Humanities. The Academy of Athens, in collaboration with the Athena Research Centre, NTUA, ICS Forth and University of Athens have developed the basic Infrastructure for the Humanities, in collaboration with Dariah-EU, also exploring synergies, especially w.r.t. content re-use with Europeana. This research 12
infrastructure will continue to be funded in the next period as well. g. Establishing a communication plan to raise awareness of Europeana among the general public and notably in schools, in collaboration with the cultural institutions contributing content to the site - Please provide details of any developments or best practice examples, within this reporting period. Most digitisation projects that are currently implemented, include generation of some services, mainly for education and tourism. Especially in the field of education, there are presentations and/or games generated which aim at reaching the school classes. For example, all involved Hellenic Ministries, Museums, Organisation such as the Stegi for Education and Arts have organised events, for students, as well as younger and older ages, in which Europeana and Europeana services have been widely discussed. DIGITAL PRESERVATION 8. REINFORCE NATIONAL STRATEGIES FOR THE LONG-TERM PRESERVATION OF DIGITAL MATERIAL, UPDATE ACTION PLANS IMPLEMENTING THE STRATEGIES, AND EXCHANGE INFORMATION WITH EACH OTHER ON THE STRATEGIES AND ACTION PLANS. - Does your country have a strategy for the long-term preservation of digital material? What actions are you planning to implement the strategy? Have you exchanged information with other Member States in order to devise your strategy and action plan? Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period. The situation with long-term preservation has not changed since the last reporting period. There has not yet been defined a clear strategy for digital preservation. It can be mentioned that the cloud infrastructures are the most promising development in this direction. The GRNet (National Network for Research and Technology) and their OCEAN Cloud Infrastructure has an important role in this framework. Currently, they offer space and services to Cultural Organisations for storing and preserving their content in the Cloud. 13
9. EXPLICIT AND CLEAR PROVISION IN YOUR COUNTRY'S LEGISLATION SO AS TO ALLOW MULTIPLE COPYING AND MIGRATION OF DIGITAL CULTURAL MATERIAL BY PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS FOR PRESERVATION PURPOSES, IN FULL RESPECT OF EUROPEAN UNION AND INTERNATIONAL LEGISLATION ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS. - Have your country made explicit and clear provision in its legislation to allow multiple copying and migration of digital cultural material by public institutions for preservation purposes? Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period. There has not been any significant change from the situation as described in the former Progress report. 10. MAKE THE NECESSARY ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE DEPOSIT OF MATERIAL CREATED IN DIGITAL FORMAT IN ORDER TO GUARANTEE ITS LONG-TERM PRESERVATION, AND IMPROVE THE EFFICIENCY OF EXISTING DEPOSIT ARRANGEMENTS FOR MATERIAL CREATED IN DIGITAL FORMAT. a. Ensuring that right holders deliver works to legal deposit libraries without technical protection measures, or that, alternatively, they make available to legal deposit libraries the means to ensure that technical protection measures do not impede the acts that libraries have to undertake for preservation purposes, in full respect of European Union and international legislation on intellectual property rights. - What arrangements has your country made to ensure that technical protection measures do not impede the acts that libraries have to undertake to guarantee long-term preservation of material created in digital format? Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period. The situation has not changed since last reporting period. The most common way of establishing the proper level of exchanging information on digital preservation plans and strategies is the participation of Greek organizations in multinational, multicultural programs and projects, where the participants are obliged to accept technology standards on digitization, to develop relevant knowledge and to operate as technology and methodology ambassadors in and out of the country. b. Where relevant, making legal provision to allow the transfer of digital legal deposit works from one legal deposit library to other deposit libraries that also have the right to these works. - Has your country made legal provision to allow the transfer of digital legal deposit works from one legal deposit library to other deposit libraries that also have the right to these works? Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period.. 14
Not yet. c. Allowing the preservation of web-content by mandated institutions using techniques for collecting material from the Internet such as web-harvesting, in full respect of European Union and international legislation on intellectual property rights. - What measures has your country adopted to allow preservation of web-content by mandated institutions? Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period. Not yet. 11. TAKING INTO ACCOUNT DEVELOPMENTS IN OTHER MEMBER STATES, WHEN ESTABLISHING OR UPDATING POLICIES AND PROCEDURES FOR THE DEPOSIT OF MATERIAL ORIGINALLY CREATED IN DIGITAL FORMAT, IN ORDER TO PREVENT A WIDE VARIATION IN DEPOSITING ARRANGEMENTS. - How is your country taking into account developments in other Member States in order to prevent a wide variation in deposition arrangements? Please provide details of any developments since the last reporting period. The Greek Governmental Organisations, Ministries, General Secretariats take these into account when designing their new policies. IS THE RECOMMENDATION UP TO DATE AND FIT FOR PURPOSE? THE RECOMMENDATION IS A NON-BINDING EU LEGAL ACT WHOSE PURPOSE IS TO COORDINATE, SUPPLEMENT AND SUPPORT MS' ACTIONS IN AN AREA WHERE THE EU HAS NO CENTRAL COMPETENCE. IN THIS CONTEXT: - What are your views on the overall usefulness of the Recommendation as an instrument to improve conditions, in the areas addressed therein, in your country? The Recommendation has been a useful tool that provided our country with guidance on the steps we should follow to keep up with the progress in the evolving field of cultural content digitisation and digital preservation. - Which provisions of the Recommendation do you consider to have had high impact in your country? 15
The provisions of the Recommendation related to organisation and funding of content digitisation, as well as to content accessibility, and all issues related to the Europeana developments were the ones that have had a high impact in Greece. This is probably because Greece was already in the process of funding and implementing many digitisation projects, based on structural funds, and was mature enough to absorb the respective provisions. - Which provisions of the Recommendation do you consider to have had low impact in your country? The provisions related to digital preservation and to digitisation of in-copyright material did not have a great impact to our developments, probably our status was not mature enough to really handle these issues. - Would the Recommendation benefit from an update to enhance its impact or bring it up to date with current challenges so that it remains relevant in the coming years? Please provide your suggestions or comments with respect to specific provisions or in general. As mentioned in our initial statement, we consider that an updating of the Recommendation to include current and possibly future challenges can be beneficial for our country. Inclusion of challenges related to creation of services, in various fields, as well as to generation of smarter cities can be of particular interest. ANY OTHER BUSINESS - Please indicate in the box below any suggestions or other comments you would like to make, or any further information you consider of use for the purposes of this progress report and/or the further implementation of the Recommendation. 16