Project led by Capgemini Consulting aims to support supply of open data across member states’ boundaries
The EU has unveiled its new open data portal, effectively upgrading the existing portal and pushing the reuse of open data from public authorities across Europe.
Named the European Data Portal, it went live today in beta version following a 10-month build period under a consortium led by Capgemini Consulting. It is planned that it will ultimately replace the three year-old publicdata.eu service. The project has begun collecting feedback from users and expects to launch version one in January.
Although there has been little fanfare, some details of the new portal have emerged in a blogpost by Wendy Carrara of Capgemini, who says that it initially includes more than 240,000 datasets from 34 European countries, structured into 13 categories including science, justice and health.
It also has a multilingual search interface, and data machine translation technology has been incorporated to translate the metadata. This should support searches and the reuse of the datasets.
Among the other features are online training modules, a checklist for using data, a guidebook for publishing data, and visualisation tools.
The project team is also experimenting with automated assistance on the data licensing to support developers in mashing data that could be subject to different conditions.
Support for authorities
Carrera says it will also support public authorities in publishing more open data on the website, and that it hopes they will be prepared to publish more datasets.
In February, Capgemini’s vice president and EU lead Dinand Tinholt told UKAuthority that the work would require the adoption of standards, based on the World Wide Web Consortium's Data Catalog Vocabulary, to ensure compatibility between individual data sets and the portal.
He said the development of the portal is part of a three year project to increase the reuse of data throughout the EU.
