Data.europa.eu

data.europa.eu
Type of site	Public service portal and ; institutional information
Available in	24 official languages of the EU
Predecessor(s)	European Data Portal, EU Open Data Portal
Owner	European Union
Created by	Publications Office of the European Union
URL	data.europa.eu
Commercial	No
Registration	Not required
Launched	November 2015
Content license	Open

Consolidating the former EU Open Data Portal and the European Data Portal, data.europa.eu is the European Union’s services package to promote the reuse of open data from its institutions’ and EU Member States’ among its citizens, businesses and other organisations.

The portal is intended to:

deliver and operate the EU’s official portal for European data, at https://data.europa.eu;
promote and support the release of more and better-quality data by the EU’s institutions, agencies and other bodies, and Member States; and
educate citizens and organisations about the opportunities that arise from the availability of open data.

Legal basis and launch of the portal[]

The two former portals EU Open Data Portal and European Data Portal, launched respectively in 2012 and 2015, were originally established on the basis of Directive 2003/98/EC to promote accessibility to and the reuse of public sector information. The successor directives 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 portal merges the activities of the European Data Portal (which focused exclusively on EU Member States and other European countries) and of the EU Open Data Portal (which served data from the EU institutions, agencies and bodies) into one. The portal is currently 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 portal was launched in April 2021.

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

The portal[]

The portal enables users to discover, explore, link, download and easily reuse data for commercial or non-commercial purposes, subject to the licence 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 portal offers many additional features for exploring open data such as statistics, use cases, open data news, data stories and country insights. Additionally, it offers an events calendar and a newsletter to help users stay up to date with the developments in the open data world.

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

Providing support to EU institutions, agencies and other bodies, and Member States[]

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

The portal also publishes datasets of European countries and organisations beyond the EU.

Since 2015, the portal has also carried out the yearly ‘open data maturity’ landscaping research, which documents the progress EU Member States are making in developing their open data offering to citizens across dimensions such as policy, portal, impact and quality.

Education and dissemination[]

The data.europa.eu portal offers news and social media coverage on open data topics, with the purpose of educating and informing citizens about the opportunities that using and reusing public data resources can bring. It also hosts the data.europa academy, a knowledge hub for open data-related topics and publishes a quarterly newsletter.

The ‘country insights’ section of the portal 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 that includes hundreds of use cases from both publishers and reusers of open data.

The portal is linked to other activities that demonstrate the potential of open data, such as the EU Datathon (an annual open data competition), the EU Open Data Days (a worldwide conference about open data and data visualisation) and different webinar series (EU DataViz webinars, EU Open Data Explained webinars and data.europa academy webinars).

Finally, the portal researches and documents the impact of open data in reports such as the 2020 report on The economic impact of open data – Opportunities for value creation in Europe. The study forecasts the open data market size and employment growth for 2025. The impact is exemplified by efficiency gains and cost savings due to open data.

Available data[]

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

So far, all EU Member States, the vast majority of 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 have made datasets available.

Terms of use and reuse for the data[]

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’s 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).

Portal solution and architecture[]

It is an EU requirement that the portal be built using open-source solutions as much as feasible. For example, it 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.

The portal’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.