News and highlights

Europe’s seas are home to a wide variety of species and ecosystems, essential to both environmental health and economic prosperity. Protecting this marine biodiversity is a core ambition of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the European Ocean Pact , which recognise the critical role healthy oceans play in climate resilience, food security, and sustainable development. Open data is key to understanding and managing these ecosystems effectively - connecting science, policy, and innovation. At the EU Open Data Days 2025 , a dedicated session highlighted how pan-European marine data

As Europe continues its digital transformation, data spaces are emerging as a cornerstone of the EU data strategy . A data space is a federated ecosystem where data is shared securely and efficiently among trusted partners, based on common rules and standards. From health and energy to agriculture and mobility, these shared environments drive interoperability and cross-sector innovation while safeguarding privacy, security, and ethical standards. Interoperability is important in making these data spaces work across systems, sectors, and countries. It spans technical, semantic, legal, and

The Commission’s Simpl programme , designed to support secure and trustworthy data sharing across sectors, has published a roadmap outlining development priorities for its open-source platform, Simpl-Open. The roadmap, which reflects feedback from the first Simpl Community Event held on Friday, 31 January, sets out planned improvements for 2025 and 2026 aimed at making the platform more user-friendly, automated and adaptable. Since January 2025, a first Simpl-Open MVP (minimum viable product) has been available, offering core features such as onboarding participants, publishing service

On 5 June 2025, millions around the globe will mark World Environment Day , a spotlight by the United Nations’ platform for raising awareness and driving action on urgent environmental issues. This year’s theme, hosted by the South Korea, is ‘Beat plastic pollution’, calling attention to the impacts of plastic pollution and how we can refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rethink plastic usage. Plastic pollution remains a major environmental threat. Over 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced annually, with less than 10% recycled. An estimated 11 million tonnes leak into aquatic ecosystems

Register now for our upcoming webinar, ‘ Charting the currents: the potential of open marine data ’ , on Friday, 13 June 2025, from 10:00 to 11:00 CEST. Covering over 70% of the Earth’s surface, our oceans are essential to life, climate regulation, and the global economy. However, they are increasingly under threat from climate change, pollution, and overfishing. This webinar will explore how open marine data is helping to address these challenges through practical, real-world applications. Participants will gain insights from two real-world case studies. The first highlights the Marine

NextGenerationEU is the European Union’s instrument to one of the greatest challenges in its history: the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. With a budget of EUR 800 billion, this temporary recovery fund is designed not only to repair the damage caused by the crisis but also to accelerate Europe’s green and digital transitions. It provides targeted support for member states to build a more sustainable and resilient Union. The Recovery and Resilience Facility is the core of the recovery plan. Member states receive funding based on their own national Recovery and Resilience Plans , which

In May, the data.europa academy hosted the webinar ‘Open judicial data, AI, and transparency in the digital age’ . The session explored the intersection of artificial intelligence and judicial data, highlighting the importance of transparency in the digital era. The webinar attracted over 700 registrants, interested to learn how AI can enhance the accessibility and openness of judicial information. Attendees had the opportunity to learn from a judicial expert from the Council of Europe, who discussed the importance and application of open judicial data for justice transparency and

Slovakia’s national open data portal, data.gov.sk , provides access to over 9 900 datasets, including more than 800 high-value datasets that support reuse in areas such as business, environment, and public services. The portal offers an overview of key data providers, enabling users to identify the most active institutions and explore local catalogues published across the country. This structure helps users navigate a decentralised data landscape and understand the breadth of information available. Search and discovery functions are further enhanced through powerful filtering tools, which

Juremy is an online bilingual concordance search tool operating on official EU terminology resources. It offers fast and customisable phrase searches across the EUR-Lex and IATE databases in all 552 EU language pairs. Juremy helps users find the right terms and document references in context within seconds. With its reliable database and metadata display, the platform also serves as a verification tool for assessing the accuracy of machine translation and generative AI outputs in the post-editing process. EUR-Lex contributes to the EU’s open data ecosystem by providing legal documents in

As air travel grows and environmental targets tighten, Europe’s aviation sector is meeting new challenges and expectations. From modernising traffic management to reducing emissions, open data is playing an increasingly central role in shaping a safer, greener, and more efficient future for European skies. Data4Safety (D4S), led by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency , is a collaborative initiative that aims to identify systemic risks at EU level as well as their mitigations. By aggregating datasets from airlines, national authorities, and air traffic service providers, D4S enables