Data stories

(Open) data and the green transition Since the start of 2020, Europe has faced several economic, social, and political difficulties, such as the COVID-19 crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These two events have short- and long-term impacts on, for example, the availability and prices of energy sources, food security, economic stability, the capacity of health care systems and defence throughout Europe. On a political level, these events motivated the European Union (EU) to accelerate the transition to a green and digital Europe, two of the European Commission’s (EC) six highlighted

At the EU Datathon 2021, ITER IDEA presented their project Wonder Wanderlust Women, a portal facilitating women’s mobility in Europe. Targeting young women, the platform helps users to search for education and work opportunities across countries. They can indicate their preferences (such as field of study, languages or budget), which are then matched with specific areas and regions in Europe. Wonder Wanderlust Women won first prize in the EU Datathon 2021 challenge ‘An economy that works for people’, along with the Public Choice Award. We recently talked with the ITER IDEA team about the life

The Russian invasion of Ukraine forced a significant part of the Ukrainian population to flee their country. Most of the refugees sought immediate shelter in neighbouring countries, but in time many reached friends and families in other EU Member States, where communities of Ukrainian origin were already established. Italy, for example, hosts one the largest Ukrainian communities in Europe, making it an interesting case study to understand the living conditions of this group. People born in Ukraine started to immigrate to Italy only relatively recently, after the dissolution of the Soviet

Among the EU Member States, Italy hosts one of the largest communities of Ukrainian-born people. According to Eurostat data, at the end of 2020 there were 223 000 Ukrainian citizens holding a valid residence permit. Only Poland had more, with almost 500 000. The Eurostat figures show that Ukrainian citizenship is the third most represented nationality from non-EU citizens in terms of residence permits, behind Morocco and Turkey. However, while the last two remained stable or decreased since 2013, residence permits for Ukrainian nationals increased steadily, with a growth of more than 50 % up

Have you ever wondered how similar different regions across Europe are? What a southern European urban region could have in common with a rural area in eastern Europe? EU Twinnings is a web application that allows the user to engage with European regions by exploring how similar they are. It’s a ‘virtual twinning’ platform that uses EU open data to calculate and visualise a similarity measure. European migration experience The origins of the app date back to the EU Datathon 2020, when its developer Giuseppe Sollazzo started to explore the concept of similarity by reflecting on his own life as

Using open data to understand politics Looking to attract readers, media fill their sites with polls, news articles and opinions about the latest political events. These include elections. The message brought by different media outlets can vary markedly and it can be hard to distinguish the ordinary from the extraordinary. Open data became a valuable tool to help put election outcomes into the right context. For example, during the 2019 European elections, the Greens obtained 12% of the votes. One media outlet described this result as a surge of support. Comparing the 2019 and 2014 elections

Rising prices - the consumer’s view Inflation has become a news headline in Europe, with Eurostat reporting that the average increase in prices from last year was 8.1%. At the same time, consumers see price increases for some everyday items increasing by substantially more. Petrol prices in Germany, for example, have increased by more than 20% since last year. In the Netherlands, the price for meat has increased by more than 10% from last year, surpassing price increases in other categories. Inflation captures the average person buying an average number of goods and services—but a meat-loving

The United Nations Refugee Agency estimated that around 10 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes since the Russian invasion of 24 February 2022. This figure represents almost a quarter of the total Ukrainian population of 44 million inhabitants. Many of those people fled to other regions of Ukraine, away from the fights, while over 5.7 million left the country entirely to seek haven abroad. It is the largest humanitarian crisis in Europe since the end of the Second World War. The flow of refugees from Ukraine is different from other migration flows in the past. Many of the

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is the practice of collecting and analysing information gathered from open sources to produce actionable intelligence. This intelligence can support, for example, national security, law enforcement and business intelligence. OSINT investigates open (source) data collected for one purpose and repurposes it to shed light on hidden topics. The whole concept of OSINT sounds counter intuitive—using open data to reveal information that organisations want to keep secret. In the war in Ukraine, OSINT has been used to get a better idea of the movements of Russian

The 2021 edition of the Open Data Maturity assessment has shown peak performances across all European countries, with the EU27 average maturity score reaching 81%, i.e., 3 percentage points more than in 2020. Among the top performers of this edition, Estonia, Slovenia, and Ukraine were highlighted in the 2022 report “Open Data Best Practices: Estonia, Slovenia & Ukraine”. To explore their impressive growth in maturity score and encourage knowledge sharing across countries, a data.europe.eu academy webinar was recently organised. Although the Ukrainian open data team was not able to attend the