The is the point of access to public data published by the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies. Information can be used and reused for commercial or non-commercial purposes. The portal is a key instrument of the EU open data strategy. By ensuring easy and free access to data, their innovative use and economic potential can be enhanced. The goal of the portal is also to make the institutions and other EU bodies more transparent and accountable.
Legal basis and launch of the portal
Launched in December 2012, the portal was formally established by Commission Decision of 12 December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents to promote accessibility and reuse. Based on this decision, all the EU institutions are invited to publish information such as open data and to make it accessible to the public whenever possible. The operational management of the portal is the task of the Publications Office of the European Union. Implementation of EU open data policy is, however, the responsibility of the Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology of the European Commission.
Features
The portal enables users to search, explore, link, download and easily re-use data for commercial or non-commercial purposes, through a common metadata catalogue. From the portal, users can access data published on the websites of the various institutions, agencies and other bodies of the EU. Semantic technologies offer new functionalities. The metadata catalogue can be searched via an interactive search engine and through SPARQL queries. Users can suggest data they think is missing on the portal and give feedback on the quality of data obtainable. The interface is in 24 EU official languages, but most metadata are currently available in a limited number of languages. Some of the metadata are in 24 languages.
Terms of use
Most of the data accessible via the EU Open Data Portal are covered by the legal notice of the Europa website. 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.
Available data
The portal contains a very wide variety of high-value 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. So far, around 70 EU institutions, bodies or departments have made datasets available, making a total of over 13,000. The portal also contains a and a visualisations catalogue. n the apps gallery users can find applications using EU data and developed by the EU institutions, agencies or other bodies or by third parties. The applications are displayed as much for their information value as for giving examples of what applications can be made using the data. The visualisations catalogue offers a collection of visualisation tools, training and re-usable visualisations for all levels of data visualisation expertise, from beginner to expert.
