Data.europa.eu

Launched in November 2015, the portal was originally established on the basis of Directive 2003/98/EC to promote accessibility and reuse of Public Sector Information (PSI). The directive’s successors Directive 2013/37/EU and Directive (EU) 2019/1024 confirmed and extended its action.

The Directive invites all the EU Member States to publish their public data resources such as open datasets, and to make them accessible to the public whenever possible.

Currently in its third consecutive iteration, the programme merges into one the activities of the previous “European Data Portal” (focused exclusively on EU Member States and other European countries) and of the “EU Open Data Portal” (serving data from the EU Institutions, agencies and other bodies). The programme is currently funded by the European Union and managed by the Publications Office of the European Union (OP). Implementation of EU open data policy is the responsibility of the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) of the European Commission, that collaborates to the project’s management.

The programme is delivered for the OP by a consortium of organizations led by Capgemini Invent and including Agiledrop, con terra, Data Excellence, Fraunhofer FOKUS, INTRASOFT International, OMMAX, The Lisbon Council and Timelex.

The portal enables users to discover, explore, link, download and easily re-use data for commercial or non-commercial purposes, subject to the license chosen by the data provider, through a common, homogenised metadata catalogue. From the portal, users can access data published on the websites of the various data providers.

Semantic technologies offer additional functionalities. The metadata catalogue can be searched via an interactive search engine (Data tab) and through SPARQL queries (SPARQL search tab).

The interface is in 24 EU official languages. Whenever the metadata is not offered in any of the languages, it is machine-translated from the original language into the others.

EU institutions, agencies and other bodies, and the Member States (the “data providers”, in short) are autonomous in publishing their open data. The data.europa.eu programme, however, complements their activities by providing additional support and education opportunities, recently collected under the “data.europa academy” offering of the programme. This offering is continuously updated once new material, such as research by data.europa.eu or other EU institutions, is published.

Yearly, the programme also performs the “Open Data Maturity” landscaping research, that documents the Member States’ progress in developing their open data offering to citizens, across dimensions such as policy, portal, impact, and quality.

data.europa.eu offers news and social media coverage of open data topics with the purpose of educating and informing citizens to the opportunities enabled by public data resources.

The “Country Insights” section provides insights into the status of open data in European countries. The section includes information about countries' national open data portal, the level of open data maturity, use cases, catalogues, events, reports, news, webinars, and interviews about open data.

The “Use Cases” section offers a catalogue of more than 900 use cases from both publishers and re-users of open data.

Finally, in the context of these activities, the programme researches and documents the impact of open data in reports such as 2020’s “The Economic Impact of Open Data”. The study forecasts the open data market size and the employment growth for 2025. Impact is exemplified by efficiency gains and cost savings due to open data.

The portal contains a very wide variety of open data across EU policy domains, including the economy, employment, science, environment and education. The importance of these was confirmed by the G8 Open Data Charter.[1]

So far, all Member States but Liechtenstein, EU institutions, bodies or departments (e.g. Eurostat, the European Environment Agency, the Joint Research Centre and other European Commission Directorates General and EU Agencies), and other countries such as Ukraine have made datasets available, making a total of over 1,2m datasets discoverable as of September 2021.

Most of the data accessible via data.europa.eu is released by the respective data providers using an open licence. Generally, data can be used for free for commercial and non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged. Specific conditions for reuse, relating mostly to the protection of data privacy and intellectual property, apply to a small amount of data. A link to these conditions can be found for each dataset.

The terms of use can be found on the site copyright notice. Most data is covered by open licences. As of September 2021, the most common open licences were the Creative Commons “CC‑BY‑4.0” licence, the “Data licence Germany – attribution” licence or Etalab’s Open Licence (used by the French Government).

It is an EU requirement that the portal is built using open source solutions as much as feasible. The solution, for example, uses Drupal as its editorial content management system. Virtuoso is the linked-data database, also offering a SPARQL endpoint. Custom software was written ad-hoc when a suitable open source option could not be found.

Data.europa.eu's metadata catalogue applies international standards such as: Dublin Core, the data catalogue vocabulary DCAT-AP (an application profile of DCAT) and the Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS).