On November 16, 2015 the beta version of the European Data Portal was launched.
The European Data Portal is an initiative of the
European Commission
The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...
, and is part of the
Digital Single Market
On 6 May 2015, the European Commission, led at the time by Jean-Claude Juncker, communicated the Digital Single Market strategy which intends to remove virtual borders, boost digital connectivity, and make it easier for consumers to access cross ...
.
Purpose
The European Data Portal was created to gather
Public Sector Information of the 28
European Member States and the four
EFTA
The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is a regional trade organization and free trade area consisting of four European states: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. The organization operates in parallel with the European U ...
countries.
These countries are also referred to as the EU28+.
Public Sector Information that can be freely re-use for any purpose is commonly referred to as
Open Data
Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license.
The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...
. The EU28+ countries publish public data on national data portals and geospatial portals. In order to provide one single access point to all of this data, the European Data Portal was created. On the portal, only metadata (data about the data) is shown. This metadata is directly harvested from the existing portals through the use of
APIs.
On April 21, 2021 the portal was consolidated with the
EU Open Data Portal
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 ...
into data.europa.eu - offering metadata of datasets previously available from both former catalogues in one place.
The data is gathered in order to promote the re-use of the public data. By re-using this data, several benefits can be achieved.
Content
The European Data Portal provides access to the data sets in different ways, via:
* Direct search;
* Data catalogues; and
*
SPARQL
SPARQL (pronounced " sparkle" , a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is an RDF query language—that is, a semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description ...
queries.
However, the European Data Portal is not just a repository for public data. The Portal offers different content:
* Open Data News;
* Re-use stories;
* Goldbook for Open Data providers;
* e-Learning tool on Open Data; and
* Library with Open Data materials.
References
{{Reflist
European Commission
Information technology organizations based in Europe
Open data
Open government
Open data portals