European Data Portal

Last updated
data.europa.eu
Type of site
Public service portal and
institutional information
Available in24 official languages of the European Union
Predecessor(s)European Data Portal; EU Open Data Portal
OwnerFlag of Europe.svg  European Union
Created by EU Publications Office
URL data.europa.eu
CommercialNo
RegistrationNot required but soon to be offered for advanced features such as saving queries and receiving alerts
Launched21 April 2021;2 years ago (2021-04-21)
Content license
Creative Commons ‘CC‑BY‑4.0’ for editorial content; dataset licensing varies

On April 21, 2021 data.europa.eu was launched as a single access point for open data published by EU Institutions, national portals of EU Member states and non-member states, as well as international organisations of predominantly European scope. [1] [2] The portal consolidates datasets previously available via the EU Open Data Portal and the European Data Portal [3] into a single meta-catalogue. The European Data Portal, launched in its beta version on November 16, 2015, was an initiative of the European Commission, and part of the Digital Single Market. [4] [5]

Contents

Currently, more than 1,600,000 datasets are published on the portal, [6] originating from 178 catalogues [7] .The portal is a metadata catalogue: in it, metadata from other data and geospatial data catalogues are published following a common ontology, namely the DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) [8] with the aim of fostering and facilitating re-use of open data, promotion and support for the publication of (meta)data of high quality and use of Linked Open Data.

The contents of the portal are available in all 24 EU Official Languages and can be freely re-used for any purpose as Open Data, following the specific license terms of datasets.

Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector information set the path for both EU and member state portals.

Decision 2006/291/EC on the reuse of Commission documents provided the rules for the opening of the European Commission's data for re-use and was later amended by Commission Decision 2011/833/EU, which committed to making data available in machine-readable formats and established the creation of an EU Open Data Portal, publishing data from all EU Institutions, agencies and bodies.

In 2013, Directive 2013/37/EU and later Directive (EU) 2019/1024, revising the 2003 Directive, established that public sector information shall be available to public for free or at a very low cost by default.

Alongside these Directives, in 2007 the INSPIRE Directive (Directive 2007/2/EC) defined an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community. The Directive sets forth, via a series of implementing rules, standards for making geo-spatial data interoperable and re-usable among member states and the geo-spatial data community. Many of the geodata portals harvested by data.europa.eu were first created in keeping with the Directive.

The portal is funded by the EU and managed by the Publications Office of the European Union. The Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology of the European Commission is responsible for the implementation of EU open data policy, in collaboration with the project’s management.

The delivery of the portal is contracted to a consortium of organisations led by Capgemini Invent, including Agiledrop, con terra, Data Excellence, Fraunhofer FOKUS, INTRASOFT International, OMMAX, the Lisbon Council and Timelex.

Features

The portal allows users to access datasets originating from various catalogues, view metadata assessment reports and explore links to similar datasets. Datasets can be viewed as web-pages or as RDF linked data in any of the 24 EU official languages.

In addition to datasets, the portal contains editorial articles related to open data, such as data-stories, news articles, studies and reports. In this latter category, the Open Data Maturity report, a yearly study assessing the level of open-data maturity of member states and EFTA countries, can be found.

The data.academy section promotes (open) data literacy by providing free access to courses, videos and learning tools related to themes such as open data licensing, linked open data, data visualisation and more.

A dedicated section offers links to external sources re-using the data, for example for building of dedicated apps.

An API and SPARQL endpoints foster access to metadata in machine-readable format.

Architecture of the portal

In keeping with EU requirements, the portal is built using open-source solutions as much as possible. For example, it uses Drupal as its editorial content management system. Virtuoso is used as a triplestore for the linked-data database, also offering a SPARQL endpoint. Custom software was written ad hoc when a suitable open-source solution could not be found.

Because all metadata is stored using DCAT-AP, specific open-source solutions were developed by the portal to map data from portals using different data-models (e.g. INSPIRE-CSW, CKAN).

Terms of use

Most of the data accessible via data.europa.eu is released by the respective data providers using an open licence. For the most part, 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 on every dataset page.

Unless otherwise specified, editorial content published on the portal is released under a Creative Commons ‘CC‑BY‑4.0’ licence. The portal’s copyright notice provides additional information on the terms of use.

As of September 2021, the most common open licences used for contents of the portal are the Creative Commons ‘CC‑BY‑4.0’ licence, the ‘Data licence Germany – attribution’ licence or Etalab’s Open Licence (used by the French government).

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EUR-Lex</span> Official website of EU Law and documents

Eur-Lex is an official website of European Union law and other public documents of the European Union (EU), published in 24 official languages of the EU. The Official Journal (OJ) of the European Union is also published on EUR-Lex. Users can access EUR-Lex free of charge and also register for a free account, which offers extra features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eurostat</span> Statistics agency of the European Union

Eurostat is a Directorate-General of the European Commission located in the Kirchberg quarter of Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. Eurostat's main responsibilities are to provide statistical information to the institutions of the European Union (EU) and to promote the harmonisation of statistical methods across its member states and candidates for accession as well as EFTA countries. The organisations in the different countries that cooperate with Eurostat are summarised under the concept of the European Statistical System.

Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European Union Public Licence</span> Free software license

The European Union Public Licence (EUPL) is a free software licence that was written and approved by the European Commission. The licence is available in 23 official languages of the European Union. All linguistic versions have the same validity. Its latest version, EUPL v1.2, was published in May 2017. Revised documentation for v1.2 was issued in late‑2021.

IUCLID is a software application to capture, store, maintain and exchange data on intrinsic and hazard properties of chemical substances. Distributed free of charge, the software is especially useful to chemical industry companies and to government authorities. It is the key tool for chemical industry to fulfill data submission obligations under REACH, the most important European Union legal document covering the production and use of chemical substances. The software is maintained by the European Chemicals Agency, ECHA. The latest version, version 6, was made available on 29 April 2016.

A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), also called geospatial data infrastructure, is a data infrastructure implementing a framework of geographic data, metadata, users and tools that are interactively connected in order to use spatial data in an efficient and flexible way. Another definition is "the technology, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities necessary to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and preserve spatial data".

A geoportal is a type of web portal used to find and access geographic information and associated geographic services via the Internet. Geoportals are important for effective use of geographic information systems (GIS) and a key element of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI).

The One Scotland Gazetteer is the definitive national land, property and address dataset for Scotland that is published by Spatial Information Service within the Improvement Service. It is compiled using information from all 32 Scottish councils and produced to common standards and specification. It is not to be confused with the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF) which is only a list of mail delivery locations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Directive on the re-use of public sector information</span> European Union directive

Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector information, known as the PSI Directive, now called the Open Data Directive, is an EU directive that stipulates minimum requirements for EU member states regarding making public sector information available for re-use. This directive provides a common legislative framework for this area. The Directive is an attempt to remove barriers that hinder the re-use of public sector information throughout the Union.

data.gov.uk United Kingdom government portal for sharing non-personal public information

data.gov.uk is a UK Government project to make available non-personal UK government data as open data. It was launched as closed beta in 30 September 2009, and publicly launched in January 2010. As of February 2015, it contained over 19,343 datasets, rising to over 40,000 in 2017, and more than 47,000 by 2023. data.gov.uk is listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data.org.

BioSamples (BioSD) is a database at European Bioinformatics Institute for the information about the biological samples used in sequencing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Directive on intra-EU-transfers of defence-related products</span>

Directive on intra-EU-transfers of defence-related products is a European Union Directive with relevance for the European Economic Area. "Transfer" in this context means "any transmission or movement of a defence-related product from a supplier to a recipient in another Member State".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asset Description Metadata Schema</span>

The Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) is a common metadata vocabulary to describe standards, so-called interoperability assets, on the Web.

The European Legislation Identifier (ELI) ontology is a vocabulary for representing metadata about national and European Union (EU) legislation. It is designed to provide a standardized way to identify and describe the context and content of national or EU legislation, including its purpose, scope, relationships with other legislations and legal basis. This will guarantee easier identification, access, exchange and reuse of legislation for public authorities, professional users, academics and citizens. ELI paves the way for knowledge graphs, based on semantic web standards, of legal gazettes and official journals.

Before data.europa.eu, the EU Open Data Portal was the point of access to public data published by the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies. On April 21, 2021 it was consolidated to the data.europa.eu portal, together with the European Data Portal: a similar initiative aimed at the EU Member States.

The European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) is a web portal that brings together marine data, data products and metadata from diverse sources within Europe in a uniform way. It was initiated by the European Commission in response to the EU Green Paper on Future Maritime Policy, launched in June 2006. The main purpose of EMODnet is to unlock fragmented and hidden marine data resources and to make these available to individuals and organisations without restriction, except in special cases. The primary motivation for EMODnet is to stimulate investment in sustainable coastal and offshore activities through improved access to quality-assured, standardised and harmonised marine data.

Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) is an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs published on the Web. By using DCAT to describe datasets in catalogs, publishers increase discoverability and enable applications to consume metadata from multiple catalogs. It enables decentralized publishing of catalogs and facilitates federated dataset search across catalogs. Aggregated DCAT metadata can serve as a manifest file to facilitate digital preservation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joinup</span> Type of collaboration platform

Joinup is a collaboration platform created by the European Commission. It is funded by the European Union via its Interoperability Solutions for Public Administrations Programme.

In natural language processing, linguistics, and neighboring fields, Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) describes a method and an interdisciplinary community concerned with creating, sharing, and (re-)using language resources in accordance with Linked Data principles. The Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud was conceived and is being maintained by the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation, but has been a point of focal activity for several W3C community groups, research projects, and infrastructure efforts since then.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcel Kolaja</span> Czech computer specialist, activist and politician

Marcel Kolaja is a Czech software engineer, Internet freedom and digital rights activist and a Czech Pirate Party politician who serves as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since the 2019 election and Quaestor of the European Parliament since 2022. He is a member of the Greens–European Free Alliance parliamentary group along with three other European Pirate Party MEPs.

References

  1. "Launch of data.europa.eu". ec.europa.eu. Retrieved 2023-01-28.
  2. "Data.Europa.EU: The new central point of contact for high-quality European data". Fraunhofer Fokus. Retrieved 2023-01-28.
  3. "Archived version of the European Data Portal". Archived from the original on 2020-04-15. Retrieved 2023-04-13.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  4. "Looking for Open Data from a different country? Try the European Data portal | Digital Agenda for Europe". ec.europa.eu. Retrieved 2015-12-16.
  5. "EC brings pan-European open data together on European Data Portal | Joinup". joinup.ec.europa.eu. 17 November 2015. Retrieved 2015-12-16.
  6. "SPARQL query retrieving number of published datasets".
  7. "SPARQL query retrieving number of published catalogues".
  8. "DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe | Joinup". joinup.ec.europa.eu. Retrieved 2022-08-30.