Open data

The European Commission has developed and published the Beta release of the European Data Portal, a portal that harvests Open Data of Public Sector Information available on public data portals across European countries. Information regarding the provision of data and the benefits of re-using data is also included. The strategic objective of the European Data Portal is to improve accessibility and increase the value of Open Data.

In this project, Open Data refers to the information collected, produced or paid for by the public bodies and made freely available for re-use for any purpose. It is important to note that not all of the public sector information is Open Data.

Regarding the public data portals that are harvested, these can be national, regional, local or domain specific. They cover the 28 EU Member States, EEA, countries involved in the EU's neighbourhood policy and Switzerland.

Open Data can be searched by categories, single search box or with SPARQL-Query. Users can browse through 13 categories that follow a revision of the DCAT Application Profile and have been mapped against the Eurovoc Thesaurus.

Results can be filtered by location, providers (catalogs), categories, tags, formats and licenses.

Of each result, users can know the dataset name, a brief description, the several distribution formats, descriptive tags, and an additional information that includes, among others, creation date, last Updated, publisher web site, etc. In the same interface there is a link to provider information and information about the license.

Summarizing, the European Data Portal is a tool to search and find Open (Government) Data, very well organized and very useful to the whole data value chain: from data publishing to data re-use.

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona