Discover the data.europa.eu Strategy Mapping Report | data.europa.eu
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Discover the data.europa.eu Strategy Mapping Report

Learn more about the mid- and long-term sustainability of (open) data portal infrastructures

 

On 2 May 2022, the report “Principles and recommendations to make data.europa.eu data more reusable - A strategy-mapping report” was published. This report summarises the research done on the mid- and long-term sustainability of (open) data portal infrastructures. More specifically, it investigates the following questions:

  • What is the role of data intermediaries (such as data.europa.eu) in the broader data economy?
  • How can open data portals evolve towards mid- and long-term self-sustainability?
  • How can software tools and platforms be designed to support data intermediaries?

Based on this report, webinars with different stakeholder groups (e.g., national open data portal teams, scientists, policymakers etc.) will be organised in 2022 and 2023 as part of the data.europa.eu academy.

To advance the understanding of sustainable data portals - i.e. portals that allow the re-use of open data by consumers over time -, the report issues 10 recommendations. Open data portals and intermediaries can promote data re-usability today and in the future by:

  1. Clearly describing the column headers or attributing names of the published dataset distributions;
  2. Providing statistical information about the dataset;
  3. Generating visual previews of the data so that it can be better understood at a simple glance;
  4. Adding as much contextual documentation as possible to the datasets, describing the whole life-cycle of the data and including any relevant information about data quality assurance methods and assessments;
  5. Explaining ethics and data anonymisation techniques applied to the dataset;
  6. Providing examples of data usage, including use cases where the dataset has been or can be used;
  7. Linking datasets to other digital artefacts that make use of them;
  8. Improving the way in which data can be found, beyond current metadata models;
  9. Enabling programmatic access to datasets;
  10. Generating persistent identifiers for the datasets to allow them to be identified and track their usage via citation tracking mechanisms to understand their use and impact.

Read the full report here!

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