Redesign and new features for data.europa.eu

The idea of data.europa.eu is to make data available to everyone in a user-friendly way. It should be accessible from everywhere with every device. That’s why we implemented a new design, which is cleaner and makes the page easier to use.

 

Cleaner design

The new design includes:

• A restructured homepage showing a carousel featuring most relevant items, an overview of the main content types a calendar of upcoming events.
• A clearer menu structure.
• Easier to understand labels.
• Dedicated events pages showing all details about the event: a description, the type of event and how to access it.

Thanks to the redesign, data.europa.eu:

• became easier to use, understand and navigate through. It has also a higher degree of accessibility, e.g. thanks to high contrast and an easy-to-differentiate colour palette. 
• is now fully responsive. This leads to a neat and complete user experience on both desktop and mobile devices.

 

Information and data at your fingertips

On the dataset pages:

• resources are now presented in a table format and they can be also previewed immediately from the table. This preview, together with visualisations, allows you to see immediately what the datasets contain.
• the presentation of the datasets metadata quality was improved. The clear metadata quality scoring gives data providers immediate and actionable feedback on how to improve the description of their datasets.

 

A powerful search

Throughout data.europa.eu more powerful search filters are offered, allowing you to easily find e.g. datasets, publications or events. 

 

Extensive documentation

Extensive documentation, both for data re-users and data publishers, was added. It outlines data.europa.eu’s mission and history, explains which contents can be found and how to use its functionalities, how to search (manually, using the filters or through its SPARQL endpoint) and how to publish datasets. It also includes recommendations about data quality and citation of datasets, and information about other services such as data storage, the licensing assistant and data analytics.

Data providers find in the documentation a description of the metadata model (DCAT-AP) and an overview the different ways to publish datasets: manual using the Data Providers’ Interface or automatic via API calls.

 

Metadata and data quality dashboards

The metadata quality dashboards allow you to get visual feedback regarding the quality of the metadata of catalogues, datasets and their distributions in compliance with the FAIR principles for making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable.

A new feature to analyse the quality of data was added. It allows you to check if CSV files are correctly formed and provides validation results and warnings. To check the quality of a dataset and its data file(s), select the ‘quality’ tab below the dataset’s title. See an example of the new dataset’s metadata quality dashboard.

 

Data providers interface and data storage

There will be a new interface for data providers to publish datasets, save datasets in draft and organise their catalogues.  Data providers will be able to login via EU Login. If you are interested in using the interface but don’t have an EU Login account yet, contact the data.europa.eu team. In addition, data providers from EU institutions are now offered a data storage space.

 

Many more features to come

More is yet to come, e.g.:

• A personal space to save datasets, create dataset lists, add comments to datasets, rate datasets or save searches or SPARQL queries. The dataset ratings will help to improve the search results.
• Access to the history of datasets allowing you to accessible better understand how a dataset evolved over time.
• Links between datasets and publications in which the data was used. This offers users a way to find out quickly if this dataset was already used for an analysis or a research paper. Like that the user can directly find additional information about this dataset.
• An even more powerful search to get quicker results, more previews and more relevant results. The end goal is one common search which gives you datasets, open data news, data stories and events in one search results page, together with filters for those who only want to see a specific type of content.
• A new search to explore visual links in a network of a datasets via a graph. This will be available for a selection of EU datasets.
• The data.europa academy will be improved with new courses, a dashboard to track your progress and the possibility to receive certificates for finalised courses.

 

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