The Program

Opening - Live translation available in English.

10:00 - 11:00 | Sitzungssaal | German

Panel discussion: RE:Form “For a guild state” - Live translation available in English.

12:30 - 14:00 | Sitzungssaal | German

Dr. Beate Ginzel (Digital City Department, City of Leipzig)

Re:Form is a new “alliance for the state of tomorrow” that brings together pioneers in digitalization and administration from the federal, state, and local levels. The approaches for a new understanding of the state will be presented in Leipzig during Dataweek.

Digital data lifecycles: management, archiving, and AI-supported indexing - Live translation available in English.

14:30 - 16:00 | Sitzungssaal | German

Chair: Linda Gernitz

The session highlights the digital lifecycle of public information, from its creation and legally compliant storage to long-term archiving and reuse as open data. Using the practical example of the city administration of Leipzig, the current implementation status, technical and legal framework conditions, and strategic development goals of digital administration will be presented. In addition, researchers will present new freely available data sets for the automatic recognition of handwritten German texts (published via Zenodo) and show how modern AI models contribute to the indexing of analog information in industrial and administrative contexts. The overarching European framework is provided by the EOSC EDEN project, which strengthens strategies for long-term digital archiving and data availability. The session combines governance, technology, and practice and invites interdisciplinary discussion on future infrastructures and usage perspectives.

• Michael Blosfeld (Office for Digitization and Organization, City of Leipzig): Tomorrow's archiving – the data lifecycle in public administration

  Public administration files and information go through a complex life cycle that is regulated by law from data creation to deletion or archiving and has been practiced for many years. But how do the legal requirements that form the basis of the digital life cycle translate to digital administration? In this context, the goal of electronic archiving is always to generate open data. During the event, which will feature a fluid transition between lectures and workshops, the current status and development goals will be clearly illustrated using the example of Leipzig’s city administration. The presentation will also explicitly address limiting factors such as legal requirements, capacities, interface developments, and expectations. The event will conclude with an interdisciplinary and open-ended discussion about prospects, expectations, and visions for the future.

• Dr. Thomas Burghardt (ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig and Leipzig University): Modern OCR methods for handwriting and labels in the German-speaking context

  Handwritten texts are not only found in historical archives, but also in modern industrial everyday life—for example, on labels, forms, or protocols. However, their automatic recognition poses particular challenges for data science, especially in German-speaking countries, where freely available, diverse handwriting datasets are rare. In this presentation, we introduce two new, publicly accessible datasets created from 852 handwritten German pages. Both datasets have been published on Zenodo and are freely available to researchers in linguistics, computer science, and related disciplines. The presentation shows how OCR models can be successfully transferred to real-world applications. The contribution combines open data, modern AI methods, and concrete industrial use cases—and shows how handwriting recognition can advance both research and practice today.

• Micky Lindlar (Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB)): EU Projekt EOSC EDEN

  TBA