Today's presenter is Julia Frankowski who is the government information librarian at Michigan State University. She received an MIIS from Wayne State University and a BA in history from Michigan State University. And today she's going to talk about the APIs of data.gov, which if you're interested in this topic, I'm sure she's going to mention this is actually an article in the Journal of Documents to the People, Code Orts Journal. So if you're interested in more of this, definitely take a look at that article. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Can everyone hopefully see my slides? I should be sharing my screen right now. I want to thank you all for joining us for this webinar today on the APIs of data.gov. So at the end of today's webinar, you will be able to understand and explain what an API is, know how to navigate data.gov to find APIs, and have an understanding as to how you might use APIs in your projects. There will be time for questions at the end of today's presentation. So what exactly is an API? APIs are everywhere. They're in our apps. They're in our websites, our software, our online widgets. But unless you're a web developer, you might not really understand their purpose or their importance. So here's the formal dictionary definition. Application programming interfaces, or APIs, are a software tool which performs a particular computational function. And APIs act as building blocks, allowing software developers to create new applications without having to code every function from scratch. Technical stuff, but what exactly does that mean? In non-technical words, what that's really saying is that APIs allow for seamless access and use of information and data stored elsewhere. So this means that developers don't need to write every piece of code from scratch. They just need to write code to retrieve information or data from the API that contains that necessary information. So because the code is retrieving information that's elsewhere, it means that this data and information does not need to be stored and updated on your own database. It's stored and updated centrally. Because of these aspects, it makes the development of websites, apps, widgets, software, et cetera much more efficient because you're not doing everything from scratch. So here's some more technical information about APIs that you don't necessarily need to know, but I'm going to point it out just to be thorough. So APIs are built with a series of protocols such as SOAP, which is an older protocol and REST. And these protocols are combined with formats like JSON and XML, which are both human and machine readable formats. With the combination protocol and format, an API is born, and this API has the ability to offer a variety of functionality that other developers can tap when those developers are creating their own interfaces. In order to actually use the API, though, you'll need to know a scripting language such as Python or PHP. Using these languages, developers can write commands to access the information and data from the API. So good APIs have documentation for how to use them, such as example queries and commands, so that developers who are trying to take advantage of all that the API has to offer don't have to guess what command does what. So they would have example code of using this parameter gets you this information that's stored in this API. So that way you have an idea of what exactly the API contains and what it can do and how to write that code without having to do once a trial and error. If there isn't good documentation, it makes the whole process a whole lot harder. So why would anyone want to use an API? You don't need to download, store, or update any of the data or information in your own database. This means that every developer is using the exact same data and information. And since it's in an API, anyone can access and use that data. This is great for making sure that there's consistency across different apps or websites. And just the process of having to make sure everything is updated in all the places can be really tricky. So having it in one central location, such as an API, makes it a lot easier. You update it in one slot and it updates everywhere. APIs also help create a more seamless user experience by enabling developers to create interrelated systems. So this seamless integration is one of the reasons why we often don't realize we're accessing information from an API. An example is when you're on a store's website and you're looking for the closest store to you. You can type in your zip code and define in your store. And chances are you're using Google Maps API when you type in your zip code in order to find the closest location. So that's one example of how there might be an API behind all that, but you don't see any of that. You just feel a little search box. You type in the information. There's stuff in the code that calls to the Google Maps API, retrieves the information, generates it on that webpage that you're on, and you have no idea any of this is going on. Additionally, APIs help save developer's time since they won't have to rewrite code for every little thing. They just need to write code to access that API. So if you wanted to find near store without accessing a Maps API, for example, there would be a lot of geolocation and things like that, and it would be a huge horrible mess. So with the API from Google or any other mapping related software thing, it makes it all a whole lot easier for everyone, and then you don't have to spend a lot of time writing all this new code and everything. So now that we've talked a little bit about the basics of APIs, we're going to move on to talking about data.gov and how to get around it to find APIs. Data.gov is a clearinghouse for locating not only governmental data sets, but also APIs, and an attempt to foster a more open government. By creating APIs that the public can access, can use to access government information and data, agencies and other governmental organizations, can allow others to spend time and money developing user interfaces to access this information. So developing apps and websites, it uses a lot of developer time and time means money, and so by allowing anyone to make these apps, websites, software, whatever with open government information, it allows these agencies to go and use their resources to do other things. But that doesn't mean that the agencies and other government organizations aren't making their own apps and interfaces. It just means that other people have the option to make something. So maybe they see government information in a way that the agency may not have seen a use for it, integrating it with other resources that are outside of the government to try and make a better product that maybe falls outside the scope of the agency. So it can really add to more widespread usage of free government information. This is what the homepage of data.gov looks like in case you've never been there. You can search in the giant search box for certain topics, and this will pull up everything on that topic, or you can click on data up at the very top center of the page to give you more advanced searching options. Clicking data gives you a lot of faceted options on the left-hand side. If you scroll towards the bottom, you can select API as the format to pull up only items listed as having API as the format. And as you can see, there's quite a few data sets with API that are available, but there are some caveats that go along with using data.gov. The APIs and other data are not actually hosted on data.gov, but on other agency websites, and this means that sometimes when you click on a link, you might not get taken to the page you were expecting. If links change and it's not always updated in a timely fashion, also certain APIs like those from the Census or NASA require you create an account first in order to get an API key to use on these keys are pretty common when using APIs. The keys are usually used for tracking your activity so that the creator can see who is using their API and in what manner, which can sound a little bit scary, but it can also be good for the agency to see that the API is actually in use. So they can warn you if they decide that they want to discontinue the API, for example, or if they're going to be major updates or if the URL is going to change, they can always get back to the users by looking at the key and seeing who's actively using it. And let them know that a few changes are coming or it's being discontinued or what have you. Another huge issue is that not all APIs have documentation on how to use them, which can make them very, very challenging. It's sort of hit or miss on data.gov as to whether there is any documentation, if the documentation is really poor, if it's acceptable, or if it's actually pretty good. So sometimes you'll look at an API and there's absolutely nothing there to tell you how to use it, and so you kind of have to play around with it yourself trying to figure out what you can do with it, what exactly does it contain, what calls it and commands, it responds to that type of thing. So here's an example of what you'd see when you click on the page you find on data.gov. This is for NASA's astronomy picture of the day API. And if you click where the arrow points, in theory you should get taken to a page with information on the API. But as you can see, it takes you to a page that says you need an API key. So you actually have to go to api.nasa.gov to request the key, and it'd make a lot more sense for the link to automatically direct you to that page rather than let there a page, but it doesn't, so you just kind of have to deal with it and copy and paste. Requesting an API key from NASA is really painless. This is part of the page that you get. You just add your name, your email address if you want. You can put in your purpose, but it's not required. And then they supply you with a key almost instantaneously. Now all agencies are the speedy when it comes to supplying keys. I requested a key from the Bureau of Labor statistics a few days ago, and they still have not responded to me. So it's one of those things where I don't know if there's human review going on for those things, but NASA is very speedy, and they actually have a very nice API documentation to show you what you can do. So this is an example of part of their API documentation. It shows you the HTTP request. So you would copy that link, and that's the link that you would use to get information from, and then any query parameters. So you can use latitude, longitude, date ranges, and then you put in your API key, and this gives you an example query of what it should look like when you are writing your query. So for this example, what this particular example does is if you've ever wondered when was the last time NASA took a picture of your house, your institution, or a location that you can think of, this query would tell you, and it would actually give you a URL to view the picture that was taken of whatever location you're plugging in with the latitude and longitude. So it's kind of neat that you can figure out that type of thing. So we'll come back to the NASA API a little bit later in some of our examples, but right now we're going to move on a bit to some examples of how others are using data.gov APIs. The nonprofit organization Sunlight Foundation is those building really neat tools and websites to keep track of different aspects of government and things like that. A clear spending uses the data.gov API from USASpending.gov, among other sources, to show where money is going, basically. And so they give different scorecards, and it's really neat to play around with and to see how exactly they're using information that they get from USASpending as well as other resources to see where exactly money is going. And this is an example of an iOS for the congressional record. While the API.data.gov might be free, and the information that they're providing is freely available, that doesn't mean that developers who use the API aren't going to try and profit off of their creation. So here in this app, these developers are actually charging money to users to access different issues of the congressional record. So you can buy this one from 2014 for 99 cents and others. All for 99 cents was subscribed, which is a little ridiculous, because there's also another iOS app from the Library of Congress that does the congressional record. And it provides all the information for free on your phone. So it's one of those things where people are always trying to take advantage of reselling things that are free in order to make a profit off of people who may not realize that this stuff is freely available. And the Department of State has created the smart traveler app that adds the latest travel warnings, alerts, and country information for those planes travel outside the U.S. So once again, you update the information in the API one place and then anything that's accessing that API gets updated automatically. So you can get the latest warnings and any other similar app would have the latest alerts and things of that nature for traveling. So those are just a couple of examples of APIs in use, but there are tons more since APIs are really everywhere. Now that you know a little bit more about APIs, where can you go to learn more? Code Academy is a great interactive training website that allows you to learn all sorts of code. So here's a listing of all that they offer. For working with APIs, I recommend learning PHP, Python, and hey, look, they even have a learn APIs course. And look at that. That's one that's highlighted. One of the options is to learn how to use Python to access the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's API. All these courses are free. They're at your own pace. You just mess around with it when you have some time. And it's a great way to expand your skill set. And another fantastic site to use is W3 Schools, which is also free and also at your own pace. And here is a listing of all that they have to offer. PHP, JSON, and XML would all be helpful for working with APIs. Learning to code is all well and good, but what if you don't want to build your own tools, but you still want to see what an API can do so you can recommend it to those who are developers, maybe at your own institution. There are some tools out there that let you see the functionality of the API and what you play around with it without needing to know too much in the way of code. So this is a great way to play with an API, especially if it has good documentation to pretty much walk you through what you're doing. One such tool called Postman. So head on over to that page. So it's a downloadable app for Chrome or Mac. I've already downloaded it. I'm a Mac user. And so this is what the interface looks like. It's nice because it saves all of your queries that you've done. On the left-hand side, you can go back and see what you've done. It also has basically the start of any command. So you have different options. And so one of your most likely to be used when you use an API are get and post requests. But mostly you're going to be using get request. So basically you're going to be asking the API, get me this information. So let's go back to the NASA page. So this is the NASA's assigned signature of the day. They give us our HTTP request. So this is where you would put it says get. And then you would just copy that link. Go back to Postman. Enter your URL. And if you just send, you'll see it gives you an error message because you need an API key, which I had already requested. This key is not any sort of authentication or anything. So it's okay if people see it. It's just basically tracking my usage. So I would click on params, which means parameters. And this allows me to start building my query. So you don't have to build some long, crazy string up here. You just have to start adding parameters to kind of build your question that way. So it's kind of like advanced searching in a database almost. So we do API underscore key and then value, paste in my key, send. And it gives you in JSON format information about the picture of the day for today. The fault is going to be today. So it gives you an explanation of what the picture is. And then it also gives you a URL. So we can open up the URL. One weird thing about this is once you click on it, you do have to click send again to get it. And it will ride you with the pretty picture. Going back to the information about the API, you can do a couple of different things. You can also add different dates. So default is today, but you can also see what pictures are for different days using this. So let's go back to our original query. Let's add in under key. We can add in date because as it shows here, date is a parameter. The format is going to be year, month, day. So I want to see what the picture was for my birthday this past year. So we can send. It once again gives us the information with text explanation and then also the URL. We click on the URL, have to say send again. And that's the picture that it provides. And so you can do this with pretty much any date. So one thing you can do with this is you can build like a little widget or something for your website if you so wanted to display the picture of the day. Or you can have it so people can put in different dates. And it would call to the API and show you whatever the picture of the day was for that particular day. So in addition to Postman, which is an app that you have to download while it's free. There's also Hurlet, which has this lovely vomiting unicorn as their mascot. But this is a browser based tool. And as you can see the setup is very similar to what Postman looks like. The only difference is you don't have to download anything. It doesn't save what you've done in the past so you can't go back and see what your previous requests were. But that's okay. So once again, we can do and we know we need to start adding some parameters because we need a key. Once again, it would be API key, API underscore key, and then we'll add another parameter for date. And let's see what the picture of the day was for the first of this year. I'm not a robot, so I'm going to launch the request. And it gives us a whole bunch of information about this particular file. Once again, the explanation, the URL, which we can open. And so this is the picture of the day for 2016. So what's nice about well done documentation is that you can, like I said, you can easily look at this and see what exactly you can do with it. You can see it's a get request. You can see the URL. You can see the date. You can see what to do. And it gives you the example query. But because you're using one of these tools, you don't have to do all of this, you know, writing the URL yourself. You can just build it basically using these different parameters. So that's just one aspect of this particular NASA API. They also have an option where you can see when was the last time that NASA took a picture of my house, for example. And it shows you how to do the request. You have to get the latitude and longitude, which you can pull from Google Maps. And then you can set, like, a begin date and an end date if you want. And then see the URL and generate the picture very similarly to what we just did with the picture of the day. What's weird about this is if you wanted to do something where you wanted to create, like, an app or something that allowed people to just plug in their address and see what was the last time NASA took a picture of their house, it would actually be a number of API calls that would have to happen. Because when we just do one request, it gives you a list of all the pictures that have been taken. So it makes it so there's a lot of different steps involved in that, which makes it rather confusing. So let's do, and it's working on pulling up all the different options to show you when were the times when NASA took pictures at this latitude and longitude. And for whatever reason it's taking a while to load, maybe this is a very busy time for NASA. I'm terribly sure about what's going on, but like I said, it would give you a list of all of the different times that NASA took pictures of your house, and then you would be able to see, to do options to view the URLs and see the pictures. So that's just some of the stuff that you can do with this. I said there's tons of different options in this, as I mentioned earlier, really good documentation. So I would recommend playing around with the NASA API just because it has so much to offer. The documentation is very easy to understand. It's not many tons and tons of pages, and it's not very technical in nature. And because they give you nice examples and everything, it makes it a very approachable API to use. Like some of the others that you may find on Data.gov where it's just kind of hit or miss. That is all that I have for you all. I didn't want to get too in the weeds with this because I know what APIs are a very complicated topic. So I'm happy to answer any questions, and I encourage you all to play around with APIs. You can try Postman, you can try Horlitz. There are also other API tools out there, but they kind of just give you a sense of what an API can do and get you an idea of what you can do with it, and if you want to try integrating it into any of your own. Widgets, software, websites, things like that. There's actually a question, Julia, while you're doing that. I was just going to read this from James. Are there any libraries? And this is for, I think for a lot of attendees, too, because there might be people who know about this happening. Are libraries building APIs into their collections? I don't know if there are any who are building them into their collections. I know here at Michigan State we have people who are working on building APIs in order to access different data sets that we've acquired from other places. For example, like ProPlus and things like that. But we're not necessarily putting it in the collection the way you put a book. We just kind of have it out there as an interface in order to interact with these different collections. So I guess in some ways it is kind of being integrated into the collection, since it's an interface to access these data sets and everything. But I don't know, it's kind of an early stage of the game at this point. I could see collecting data sets from government agents using them to offer an API as one other way to access. Yeah, definitely. I think that would be an interesting way to do this. And I think it would definitely take all of us a little bit plugging around and then playing around with it to be able to get to that point. But that would be really cool. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, why would you use API versus just giving the link to the webpage where API is already in use? Well, the API is basically just – it's structured not really human-friendly data and information by building like a widget or something to access the API. It gives it a pretty interface for users to interact with. So APIs are kind of all in the blog code that most humans look at and don't really know what to do with. And then the interface that you build in order to interact with the API gives it the pretty face. And the approachableness that our users expect. Have you had any data reference questions where accessing data via API came in useful to you or the researcher? That's a great question. I have not encountered that situation. We just hired our data librarian, so I don't know if they've had any questions. We've been without a data librarian for a while. So I'm not sure if our previous one ever had this issue or anything like that. This is just something that's kind of – I like to play around with. And I haven't yet seen questions, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future I got a question from like a political science faculty member who needs help accessing information that would be best handled by using an API in order to get at and then having to have some sort of interface in order to access that more easily. But we have several programming librarians on staff, so they would probably be the ones responsible for doing the actual like work with building the code and the interface in order to interact with that API. My job would basically be locating an API that would be suitable for them for that purpose. You're wondering if other sites besides NASA have good documentation if you run across particularly good sites for – because NASA does seem to have a lot of assistance for our guidance for people who are trying to do this. Yeah. I was looking through a bunch of them, and many were not very good at anything at all. It was really scant and kind of disappointing. Census has pretty good documentation. And then there was one that was – it was something about food atlas, but it used ARC GIF, and it was very good thorough documentation, but it was very, very long, very, very complicated because it was GIF mapping stuff. It used census track data and all sorts of information to find out basically where there was food insecurity and things like that in their API. And it was – while good documentation, it was a lot to get through. Most of what I've come across on data.gov – one could almost say barely APIs. They may just be a dataset, and you'll look at it and it's like, well, it's just one dataset. This isn't really much of anything. It doesn't have any documentation to it. So like I said, it's really hit or miss. I would recommend you can sort in data.gov by most popular, and usually the most popular APIs on data.gov have the best documentation to look at, which is why they're popular. People are actually able to use them. Yeah. And James is completely right. It doesn't make sense to have an API for one simple spreadsheet that's never going to be updated. It's going to be the same information over and over again. It's for more complex datasets, basically. Things that will be updated frequently, things that have multiple variables in it, things like that. Well, what about pulling from different datasets as Jenny asked? You can do that. An API allows you – if you built the API, you can pull from different datasets in one place, and so you're not having to go from one dataset to another. This basically eliminates that step and puts it all in one spot. But you could pull from different datasets if you wanted to, but there's just a lot more like work. Yeah. And so there – as Jenny pointed out, that she means more like one dataset, like to pull data and then pull mapping data. So there are APIs that do pull, for example, like numerical data, and then they pull GIS data. And then they put that together in a nice API that you can access that will combine those two. And so it makes it so you aren't having to go to both places and trying to mesh those things together. The API could pull those all together. There's a question, would it be viable to use APIs as a collection development tool? I think that would be an interesting one. Let's see why you couldn't use the API in order to make sure that you're collecting all of the EPA datasets. Yeah, the problem is that it's possible that the API could go away, whereas web archiving, at least, you know for sure you're saving it somewhere. So that would be my main concern, is if you're only relying on the API, it's possible it could just disappear or be discontinued, and you may not know it. So you're kind of, since you're not downloading any of the data when you're using the API, you're just sending a call to the API, you're not saving anything. So you don't have any sort of backup with that. All right. Well, unless there are any more questions, say thank you to our presenters. You're welcome. And thank you all for attending.


Hi, welcome everybody. Thank you for staying even around dinner time. So our next speaker is Mr. Cedric Thomas. The floor is yours. Give a big hand to him, please. Good afternoon. My name is Cedric Thomas. I'm the executive director of the open-source organization, the OW2 open-source organizations. We are celebrating our 10th year this year in 2017. We are an open-source organization. We host projects. Our mission is to develop a codebase of open-source projects. These projects are developed essentially by a different type of communities, mainly from Europe. We run them. We're not a repository. We are a community. So it's all run with governance. And we have members that pay the fees. That keeps us independent. Of course, we come from free software. We make ours the four freedoms that were designed, defined like 30 years ago. And that makes the foundations of what we do. But we also realize that free software, through some dubious ways, became commercial. And free software became commercial open-source. That's the reason why I want to cover this about the value chain. That's what brought our interest for the value chain. And how we can support our project, become better projects out there in the market. So what I'm going to cover this afternoon, right now, very quickly, is what is the value chain, how we understand it. What is evaluating readiness for market readiness? What is that kind of evaluation, how it works? Then what happens in the open-source world? The technologies and where we come from, how we've been doing this. And then I'll show you exactly a little bit of where we are. So really take it as sharing a work in progress. I'm happy to discuss this with you. The job is far from being finished. So open-source project and the value chain, these projects come all in different flavors. We have what we call community projects that are more or less loosely coupled projects with sometimes uncertain sustainability. We have enterprise projects that are really supported by commercial companies behind and our real market product. And increasingly we have what we call collaborative projects that are R&D projects, many of which are supported and funded by the European Commission. So most of them, they want to address a customer. They all have a mission to be used on the market and to address some users or some customers. But software is only code, and code is just text, and what you do with text, you don't do much. The minute you want to do business with software, this software becomes a product. The minute you want to have a customer with this software or with the services that come with software, we're talking about a product. But what makes a product? A product is not just the code. It's the code plus everything that makes it usable for the end user. Roadmap, documentation, training, support, expertise, etc. And that's where we see the value chain. That's what creates value. What creates value? It's all this. It's not just the code, but it's the code plus what you put around that makes it actually usable by an average customer. Not another developer like you, but somebody who's an average decision maker who has to buy a product to run a business. And what happens when you look at the most projects, the many open source projects, many of those you see rough codes on GitHub, they are stuck upstream. They miss all this, what is downstream, what is between them and the customer. And that's what we call the delivery challenge. This is what we want to address by evaluating the market readiness of our projects. We also have something a bit special about open source is that the average decision maker, they want to trust open source software, they want to make sure that they are predictable, they're not just like there or something developed by hobby developers. And who creates this value? What is the ecosystem? The ecosystem is made of the contributors first, those who write the code, of course, but we also have systems integrators that make the code and the software actually fit for specific business purposes. We also have what we call fiduciary services, which are specific organizations that provide administrative and fiscal or financial services to this project. We have those, this bit nervous, those that sell distribution, think of OpenStack distributions, Doop distributions, Linux distributions. Of course, we also have the users that are part of this ecosystem. They also contribute back to the project and we have the open source organizations. And that's where we fit and that's our perspective. And this is why we think we can bring something to our project. And we bring something in three layers, a technical infrastructure. We are focused on infrastructure software, so we invest a lot in cloud computing and that's where we want to take our project. We also invest in governance and in quality and part of the governance is the quality. We have this quality program that we call OSCAR. This is where market readiness evaluation fits. And we also have a marketplace and this is why we want to have market ready projects that we can provide to the marketplace. So evaluating market readiness and maturity is something that comes from a long time. The model of all evaluations is what we call the technology readiness level. That's something that was developed by the NASA, then reused by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy. And that scales technologies from the bottom where it's useless to the top where it's very useful. It's been exploited in day-to-day mainstream operations. When I was looking at that and thinking what we could do for our project, I came across an investment readiness level scale from an investment company that applied the same approach. Another one in terms of market evaluation is that one where they put the scale flat and from left to right, you have a more business or market perspective. When you see the different kind of stakeholders from the left to the right, you start with basic research with government labs and academia and towards the left and to the right, you have the large businesses and the product. And the red line here illustrates the amount of funding that is often available for some of the projects. So that's a perspective from evaluation. But there is another thing that we come from which is evaluating open source projects. The evaluation of open source projects comes from a long time, long perspective. There are dozens of tools available, typically because the open source projects run on open platforms that generate scores of data and there are lots of tools and companies to analyze this data. We worked with one of them who's been there, I can mention them, I don't know if they are in the room, but some of them are doing very, very good jobs. So for us it started in 2007 with an European project called Colipso that was more mainly academic that delivered something like that which was a huge spreadsheet with hundreds of questions to evaluate the project. So in 2010 we took Colipso and other projects and other tools like Sonar, like Phosology and we decided not to reinvent the wheel, not to create an assessment methodology, but only to make available those tools to our project so that the users can look at the data and have information about the project. So the project was not anonymous, we want to share and make them transparent and share data with the users. And we also reused what we had from the Colipso open source maturity model. We made it a little bit more user friendly. In 2012 we got involved into a research project called RISCOS which had another interesting perspective which was to analyze open source project in terms of RISC analysis and RISC management. What's interesting about that is that it really comes from the fact that open source is becoming mainstream. We had to deal more and more with mainstream conventional managers for whom open source was something a little bit evil, was a little bit dangerous. So the perspective in terms of RISC was something that was interesting from then. The good thing here is that talking about RISC takes the information one step level, one step higher. It's not just about data or just information but it's more about perspective understanding, bringing meaning to the data. In 2015 we came across the Nindex Foundation and the core infrastructure initiative that was launched after the heartbeat failure. And we got involved with David Wheeler and we realized that we're doing pretty much the same agenda. I said that we're much more pragmatic. If you look at the first list of things that we're checking, we're checking whether the project had a website, which is something we're totally overlooked. So having done that, here is our approach. We have a whole platform which is called OSCARNA for open source capability assessment radar that covers many different aspects of projects. It's already in production, so these are screenshots from our website. For a given project we have the result from the OMM, the assessment. This is what you can see from the project. We have the phosology data, we have the SonarCube analysis, we have RISC analysis, our RISC models are public. You can change them, you can adapt them to your business needs. And we publish, we end up with a market readiness scorecard. But it's just a scorecard and it's not the technology readiness level thing we wanted to have. So the work in progress in the presentation, no, no, this is the most important one. The work in progress is that we have lots of data out there produced by many different tools and we need to put them in a one-dimension scale. That's what we're working on at the moment. The one-dimension scale is a series of different scenarios and each stage of that scale represents a different situation, a different scenario. It's a synthesis work that we're doing with our project managers and that we're planning to really announce at our annual conference in June. That's all. Thank you. So I'm sorry to do what the second mic isn't working, but we can still take some questions. I'll just run the mic up and down. Anybody have? I see a question up there. Yeah, we're talking about the CII and the CII is mainly about evaluating security in the software. It's not only security. When we discussed with them, we realized that the scope was broader than security. So we're also trying to add to that actually merge all the different criteria we analyzed so that we have a common standard and had security. Maybe security we will not cover. We leave that as an option for them. Anyone else want to shout out a question? No, I don't have that feedback of whether companies have actually used them to make decisions or whether that has influenced decisions. What I know is that users are looking at those because we see the way the pages are consulted. What we do, we kind of reserve this for our project. So in order to project gets into the code base and has access to all these facilities. And again, I have to say it's a co-production. It's something that we do for them, but we expect the project leaders to also do and contribute because we understand that helps them improve their project. So we work together on that. So if there's no more questions, then I would like to wrap up and give a big hand to Cedric for his talk.


Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to Art of Awakening. My name is Ona Christie, and today let's talk about the energies of Saturn. So depending on when you come across this video, Saturn is gonna... You'll have come here under the influence of Saturn in some way. Right now I am posting in early May 2022, and we're in the midst of eclipse season, and we're about to go into a really significant eclipse, which will be on the 15th, 16th of May. It's in the sign of Scorpio, and it is square Saturn. So this is gonna be... for some of us, it may feel like a doozy of an eclipse, and here's why, because first of all, it's in the sign of Scorpio. Okay, so this Scorpio is the sign of, like, Saxon death, all this deep stuff. Okay, so it's going deep, and it's a water sign, so it can... you might find emotional things coming up, right? To be processed, as will often happen, definitely for a full moon, and especially a lunar eclipse, right? Often will bring us into the shadows emotionally, and when we're dealing with Scorpio, it can be sometimes kind of stinging energy or just really intense energy coming up. So if you've been feeling it, you're not the only one, and so this is just kind of a... be aware that these energies are here to be processed, are here to be brought up, so that we can work through them and take power from them, right? Because any kind of the pain, energy, or the challenges that we go through are here as tests, and that brings us into the meaning of Saturn, or the energy of Saturn. Okay, so in astrology, if we have a square, usually that means there's going to be some tension, and you know, when we are square Saturn, Saturn is a super interesting planetary energy to me. Whereas Jupiter is this expansive energy, the energy of expansion, of abundance, Saturn's a contractive energy. So it's one that has to do often with challenges and limitations and learning our limitations, learning our boundaries, okay? And so I like to think of Saturn as the taskmaster or the one in charge of initiations, right? The schoolmaster, the stern father, is often a way that Saturn is portrayed. And so you have this energy, this divine masculine energy, but it is... There's different aspects of divine masculine as well as divine feminine, okay? And some aspects of divine masculine are the protector, if you think of Archangel Michael, and some of those similar archetypes, you know, or it can be... It could be a protector, it can be a guide, right, a wise teacher. Saturn is a type of guide, but he often comes in as... Often our first impression of Saturn is as in antagonistic energy, or one that's trying to mess up our lives, or posing obstacles, and that is true, but it's really important to remember that he is here as an ally, right? And if we start to relate to Saturn as an ally, then things start to fall into place. Okay, so Saturn... Often when you're dealing with Saturn energy, you're going to see obstacles come up. You're going to see challenges and the thing to remember is that it is through those challenges that we grow and that we learn and that we learn what is our truth and learn to, you know, align with our own truth, right? And so this is what these challenges do, and this is what Saturn does as you start to relate to Saturn in a way. It becomes... It transforms. You can transform this energy from, you know, why is the world against me to...  What do I need to look at within myself? Where am I off-balance? Because what Saturn does is as well as any of the trickster energies, right? What they do is they show us where our boundaries are. They show us where we're off-balance, and then it's up to us, right? And there's different ways you can deal with it. One is by fighting it, and typically that's kind of a losing battle, right? Because these are archetypal energies that come up that show us our limitations. We do have limitations. And if we're just like, you know, sometimes we have to fight our way through things. But if we're fighting the fact that life is hard, good luck, because as a wise counselor said to me today, life is supposed to be hard. It really is. And if you look at any of life's creatures, oh, these beautiful creatures that are growing, right? Whoops. You know, the trees. Let's even just take an apple tree. An apple tree has to have a period of really intense cold for it to bear fruit, right? There are like a jack pine that needs to go through the fire in order for the cone to burst open and for a new life to come out of it. And this is true for all living beings. All living beings need a certain amount of stress and challenge in order to, you know, find the strength within themselves and to activate their own inner strength and the life force. So the life force is actually nurtured partially through challenge, okay? Obviously the challenge, okay, so this energy of challenge, it can get unbalanced. We'll talk about that in a sec. But it's really, really important to remind ourselves that all the challenges in our lives really are here for us to, you know, as opportunities for us to rise up, rise to the challenge and to really come into our truth. Often that means looking with deep, deep honesty at where we are off balance, right? It's, it's, you can't really go through a challenge. What happens is like if we're off balance somewhere, there's gonna be a challenge that will come up because we're off balance and sometimes we try to accommodate for being off balance by going more in the direction that we're already polarized, okay? Because that's the direction that we are naturally leading anyway, okay? So anything that's trying to take us and kind of mess with our balance, we're gonna likely first go more in the direction that we already were, okay? So when we're dealing with this energy of dealing with challenge, there's two ways that we can get off balance. One way is to overcompensate, right, with power and that would be to get into this hyper, hyper warrior or drawing on other people's energy, right? So we can either get so much in fighting mode that we don't realize that we're actually just fighting ourselves or we can start going into vampiric mode and, you know, pulling on other people's energy and these are both survival responses, okay? So there's no judgment here, right? Just I'm asking to be aware if you see these patterns within yourself and it's easier to see in other people than it is in oneself, but I think with this full moon energy it's really going to, if you can humble yourself enough, and I'm speaking for all of us, myself included, to start really being honest enough with ourselves to say, hey, is there something within me here? Am I following this pattern? And having that self-awareness and the, so the overcompensation, the overdrive, the overuse of power is one way that we can be off balance. A lot of this has to do with our masculine energy, right? And the other way that we can go off balance with that is by giving up, by becoming incredibly passive and either checking out or just say, hey, anything goes. Sometimes when sometimes it's a good thing to just kind of go with the flow and chill, but at other times we can use that as a mechanism for checking out and not actually dealing with things that we need to deal with, okay? So part of what Saturn energy does teach us also is boundaries and where our limitations are and where we need to draw the line for other people, okay? So if you notice that within yourself, you're going the passive route and that can that can manifest spiritually as, oh, everything's good and you know, everything's divinely ordained and I'm just going to transcend it all and I'm just going to sit in meditation or you know, just allow everything to happen and not actually deal with things that need to be dealt with, okay? So that's that's the the the overly passive side and the challenge that Saturn brings to us is to find that middle way, right? To find that place and another wise counselor once described the word compassion to me as a balance between mercy and justice, okay? So mercy being the you know, the the unconditional love and the acceptance, right? And the forgiveness and then justice, I think referring to natural law, there are always natural consequences to whatever we do, the universe itself will show you, you know, if you're off balance and so we ourselves need to recognize and abide where where natural law needs to take an effect and if we can hold that balance between the you know, the justice and and recognizing the wisdom of the universe and in terms of consequences and to hold our ground, right? And to respect that natural law, even if it's something that we wouldn't want for instance, I'm going to bring kind of like the idea of parenting sometimes looking at Saturn as a wise father, right? Sometimes a father has to let his children go and make mistakes and just allow that, allow them to you know, make the mistakes that they need to make or even set up situations where they are challenged, right? That's the task master and sometimes it is sometimes we're like, oh my dad is such a hole, right? Because oh man, he made me do this.  And so you know, if you're if you're experiencing challenges right now or if you, you know, as you move forward if there's any challenges coming your way here is the encouragement is to first of all, breathe in center and then take a look at yourself just really honestly, ran out of room on my camera. So so yeah, three keys to working with Saturn. When Saturn comes knocking on the door one is self-awareness and being completely honest with yourself, really looking beyond any stories that you've attached to, be aware that you can attach to stories do your best to really honestly feel into what is true for you and another one is compassion, having compassion for yourself and gratitude, right? Being grateful for all the experiences that we go through knowing that each one is here for a reason to help us to grow and to expand. Because Saturn, being the contract of energy, actually is here to support us in our expansion. We just need to pass the initiations first. So much love to you and remember that you have your own inner guru, right? So really, really, really know that deep inside you know exactly what to do and remember you were born to be free.


I'm Heather and from Pale Waves. We're a band and we're from Manchester. This is our first time ever at Great Escape. I've heard so many great things about this festival. It's really well known and there's a lot of industry people here and it's just a really great festival to be a part of.  It's still mind-blowing for me. There's just not a better feeling than performing the other songs.  You know, I do it for a reason to escape but as Pale Waves is getting bigger you definitely consider the fans way way more when you're writing something that you're really proud of you just can't wait for them to hear it as well and we give a really honest performance. We just want everyone to have a really good time and enjoy themselves. My name is Dermot Kennedy and I am a singer-songwriter from Ireland. I was in a band for years and then we split up so just because I was back on my own I started doing more acoustic stuff with that kind of intimacy whereas it's grown now to a point where there's four of us in the band and it's kind of like a much bigger production than what it was even two years ago. It always just pushed for kind of intimacy and people sitting down and chilling out and kind of just people being completely focused and I just realized you can kind of have both and it kind of exists in the music as well dynamically like there's moments that are still acoustic and there's moments that are much bigger. I started writing before I started playing nearly and then it was just almost a vehicle to kind of get those songs across. If you just try and kind of focus on yourself and not worry too much about like pressure from anybody else it's just purely about the music, there's nothing else and if you can kind of make that lane for yourself where you can connect with a large amount of people and for it always to stay the same and to fill rooms with people that are only there for the music I just think that's what I'd like to be known for. You know us being from Canada this is a great way for us to be exposed to some more UK audiences and it's great how it's in all these small bars and little venues. We're like a live rock and roll band so we really excel in playing like in small venues where people can really feel us out you know so it's really great to be a part of this festival where there's so many opportunities to play those sorts of venues. To us playing live is the most important thing we rehearse every day when we're home we make sure we play as a band every single day together and I think that helps translate with our live show and our album we also recorded part of it live off the floor as well so we really hold that near and dear to our hearts. I hate to bring up the girl thing you know people might have that expectation when they see you that you're not going to be good because of your gender and age so you have to be better than the dudes that are playing you have to be as good and better than them to compete in this market so that was something that we had in our heads getting started so performing has been really important to us to make sure that we make a strong impression every time we get up on stage. I'm Alma, I'm a singer, artist, songwriter and I come from Finland. I think when I started to just know who I am as a person then I started to feel also more comfortable. If somebody don't like me they can go away but I'm not going away so like I love that feeling. Typical Alma show is very energetic a lot of emotions and feelings a lot of gay people and gay people are the best people in the world so I'm just enjoying and they hopefully are enjoying a lot of energy and good vibes. It's important that there is small clubs and there is a chance for new artists to conquer the world. Do everything if it makes you happy if it's not making you happy then do something else. I don't even care like I can do hundreds of interviews if I get to be on stage and sing and see the fans you know it's just for me it's just why I do this it's so important.


my channel with your new hair. My name is Sepi and today is a huge family YouTube collaboration I guess. It's basically one of my classic OG videos with a twist. Yes, today we are doing a Persian dance competition. So basically we have split ourselves up into teams. It is kids versus parents, different songs and then we each take it in turns to dance to the song and then we will leave it to you guys to decide who is the winner. We will try and decide from the comments. So if you guys like this video and you want to see more videos like this please don't forget to hit thumbs up and subscribe down below. Don't forget to check out everyone's channels not just mine. So we have Meezeger the Ma and we also have Dr. Sol and they do Farsi vlogs on their channels and videos and Persian food recipes. Don't forget to check that out. So we're gonna get started. We're also gonna give our own judgment of who we think won each round. Okay. Obviously it won't really count because Sol and I are quite good at this. This is our third dance challenge. I'm gonna like start with a song that they, you know, are more familiar with. I think they won. I think they won this round. Yeah, they were too cute. Some more cute talent. But at least you're acceptable not the winner. Okay, but this one, this one, you guys, we're gonna win this. 5,000 house. No. This song definitely died. We won because we are so old. Because of the old way. Yeah, definitely. Next one, a classic.  So we won that round. We won. I think it's better be moving to the viewers. I think that was a bit difficult to judge. Okay. I was enjoying the song. Yeah, we definitely won. So let us know. Every guys, every song, right? Who do you think won? Like literally list the songs and right? Who do you think won for each song? She's just like, she's so cute. And then he is there. This is not a start to your song. Okay, what's your song? And you have to, what's your song? Who do you think won? No, no, no, no. I said to you. It comes up in every video because it's a... He's letting him down so I think we stand a chance. So this is our last song. If you guys have enjoyed this video, then please give it a thumbs up. And don't forget to subscribe down below and check out everyone's socials. They're across the screen. Make sure.