News and highlights

Soon the European Data Portal will merge with the European Open Data Portal to continue under a new name: data.europa.eu. Under this name, the project will continue on its mission to support European countries in publishing open data, increasing their open data maturity, and promoting awareness of open data’s potential for re-use. The goal of the data.europa.eu project is to improve accessibility and increase the value of public sector information along the whole data value chain. Therefore, the team will continue to operate, maintain, and further develop the data.europa.eu portal, support EU

The organisation that manages the Italian Open Data Portal, the Agency for Digital Italy (AgID), recently released an update to the portal that greatly improves user experience and encourages the sharing of data between public administrations. The update enables users to search based on keywords, making the search service much more effective. Several additional edits have been made to improve the design of the portal and to make open data more easily accessible. In addition, the new version of the portal also incorporates the catalogue of public administration databases. This now makes the

In the summer of 2021, the Open Maps for Europe project is expected to provide free access to use maps from over 40 countries across Europe. The project is a collaboration of EuroGeographics and the National Geographic Institute (NGI) Belgium, supported by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme of the European Union. A new online interface, created by thinkWhere will make it possible for users to access map, geospatial, and land information. Apart from topographic data, the gateway will also provide a digital elevation model, imagery, a cadastral index map, and a regional gazetteer

Open Cycle Map is a website with updated cycle paths across Europe. Cyclists can use the online Open Cycle Map to zoom in and out of specific locations and select cycling paths. The paths are numbered and have different colours according to whether the cycle path is a national, regional, or local cycle route. Thereby, the map also shows icons for relevant services such as bicycle shops, rental stations, toilets, cafes, drinking water fountains, shelters, hospitals, and post boxes. The open data sources that have been used to develop the Open Cycle Map, such as height data from NASA, have been

The British Museum has about eight million objects in its collection, half of these are portrayed in the British Museum collection database. Visitors can choose from curated collections, including desire, love, identity and death and memory, as well as those focusing on the Americas, China and Africa, which reveal the fascinating stories behind the objects. A new online collection launched in early 2020 includes new records and allows for new ways to search. Cultural open data is uploaded in the form of high-resolution images of art. The database of the British museum is one of the earliest

Doctena is a rapidly growing company that originated from Luxembourg with an application and website that connect patients and doctors across Europe. Patients can use Doctena to book appointments with health specialists, such as medical doctors, dentists, and physiotherapists. Geographical and (anonymised) medical data is used to connect patients with the right health professional. For example, patients can book an appointment with a health specialist based on their geographical location, language, and the displayed waiting times. The user satisfaction for the service is high, as 96% of the

The online collection of the Louvre museum comprises high-resolution pictures and scans of artworks. The Atlas database covers some 30,000 objects on display in the museum. Through the database, artworks are more easily accessible for the broader public as people can see images of artworks and read English descriptions online. Users can search items through keywords, departments, rooms, and recent acquisitions. The following are available online: Egyptian Antiquities Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities Oriental Antiquities Byzantium Arts and Christianity in the East Islamic Arts Graphic Arts

The recent European Data Portal analytical report on Open Data and cities already underlined that European cities are taking bold steps in their Open Data journey. "Your city's data belong to you!" is the message with which the German city of Gelsenkirchen kick-started its Open Data Portal in May 2017. Under the motto "Wir #Offene Daten" (We #OpenData), the city of Gelsenkirchen, in cooperation with the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, invites its citizens to access the published data and "make more out of it". An example is the development of web applications such as apps and

Ukraine noticeably improved its Open Data position when looking at the Global Open Data Index. For the first time since the measurement started in 2013, the country is now among the 50 most open nations, ranked 31st. One of the tangible improvements is found on the national Open Data portal data.gov.ua. The portal now offers over 30,000 datasets. Moreover, the country released the registration data of Ukrainian companies and court register data, via its Opendatabot service. Based on the considerable progress from last year, the question arises: what will the upcoming years bring? As part of

The Dutch Knowledge Center for War Resources now has its own Open Data portal. Over the course of the last decades hundreds of organisations in Europe collected historical information on World War II. The current portal presents 59 datasets, resulting from the joint archive efforts of more than 100 organisations in the Netherlands. The Open Data registry consists of a historical thesaurus, a list of music that was forbidden during World War II, as well as Open Data on current war monuments. In this way, the Open Data portal increases the digital accessibility of war archives and teaches Dutch