The recording of our first webinar for data providers is out!
Learn more about the portal data.europa.eu and its services
On Friday 16 September, the first webinar for data providers ‘Data.europa.eu – The official portal for European data’ took place.
During this webinar, we focused on data.europa.eu as the single point of access to European open data, with over 1.4 million datasets from EU institutions, European countries and other international organisations. We defined open data as ‘any data that is made available with an open licence’ or, following the definition of the Open Knowledge Foundation, ‘data that can be freely used, re-used and distributed by anyone’. To ensure open data is consumable, the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse) principles are followed.
We outlined several reasons for why open data is important:
- it enhances transparency of the democratic processes, by enabling the participation of any sector of the civil society;
- it supports the creation of new products and services, and drives innovation;
- it increases the efficiency and effectiveness of governmental services;
- It shapes new knowledge by combining different data sources.
Yet, ´open data is only useful if it is of good quality`. This is why data.europa.eu also places particular attention on data quality through – among others – its ´Data Quality Guidelines` and quality-related trainings.
Additionally to being a catalogue of metadata, data.europa.eu offers weekly news pieces and monthly data stories that discuss open data-focused topics. Moreover, the portal publishes a yearly study on the state of maturity of open data across Europe along four dimensions: policy, impact, portal, and quality. The 2022 edition of the report ´Open Data Maturity` will be published in December.
Through the webinars organised under the data.europa academy, the portal aims to improve the open data skills across different sectors of our society and to raise awareness about data literacy and open data re-use. A further example of how data.europa.eu encourages re-use is through the EU Datathon competition, which sees different teams of re-users developing innovative open data-driven applications along specific themes. This year´s competition focused on digital transformation, the EU Green Deal, and public procurement. The final event of the 2022 EU Datathon where the winners will be announced will take place on 20 October 2022 and you can already register here.
Curious to learn more about data.europa.eu? Then watch the recording of the webinar and stay tuned for the next webinars for data providers. You can find the schedule and topics in the ´Learning corner for data providers`.
Finally, for more news and events, don´t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, or subscribe to our newsletter.