Data stories

Electrical bikes are increasingly popular in Europe. According to the latest figures, in Germany electric bicycles now account for 12.5% of the total bike sales; in Holland the e-bike market share in 2015 reached 28% of the total bike market. This figure is close to the development that is predicted for the e-bike market in Europe in the next five years. Electrical bikes have a battery on board...

Everybody can use a break once in a while to relax, spend time with their family or to travel the world. During the autumn period it is a good time to think back of the summer holidays you had and to plan the holidays for next year. Open Data allows you to compare the average annual holidays per country and to compare them with the European Union average. The table below shows the average annual...

Can we see an acceleration in the development of Open Data Maturity in the 28 European Union countries plus Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland (EU28+)? A second assessment in a series of annual studies highlighting the most important findings of the Open Data Maturity Assessment has just been published. Open Data Maturity is measured by taking into account Open Data Readiness and Portal...

The European Data Portal harvests the metadata of Public Sector Information available on portals, both national and regional/local, throughout Europe. Currently there are 71 catalogues harvested, which provide a total amount of more than 640,000 data sets. When looking at the download statistics, since the launch of the portal on 15 November 2015 the most downloaded data is from the national Open...

Open Data is made available in a wide variety of domains and for various reasons. One of the main reasons governments provide their citizens with Open Data is transparency. For example the city of Los Angeles has published data about accidents on its streets. Journalists have developed maps of the location of these accidents. Citizens understand now better that when construction is taking place at...

Since the launch of the first smartphone, just 20 years ago, the number of smartphones has increased extremely fast. Already in the year 2013 alone, more than one billion smartphones were sold. Smartphones allow people to be online where ever and whenever they want. The increased demand to have internet available at any location has resulted in an increased demand for Wi-Fi spots as well. Now it...

In total there are currently 597,090 data sets on the European Data Portal. To find your way in this tremendous amount of data, there are 13 different data domains in which the data sets are divided. As explained in a previous Featured data article, approximately 70% of the data sets are mapped to the data domains. When exploring the domains more closely, one can wonder whether data domains with...

With Open Data on nearly all subjects, it serves as a source of information for many applications, purposes or services. These examples of Open Data re-use further emphasise, enhance the versatility and show the opportunities offered by Open Data. However despite the widespread use and diversity of Open Data applications, it can sometimes be difficult to present an interesting example of a product...

Berlin and London belong to the most dynamic cities in Europe. Both are capitals of two big European economies and both attract the most active, innovative people and companies. Despite these similarities the cities have a different status in their countries; London is a super-city, which is driving the whole British economy while Berlin has high political and cultural status, but does not belong...

With August coming to its end, also the summer weather is about to leave and autum will soon arrive. While the last week of August is treating Europe well with some (last) rays of sunlight, the weather is about to change. All European countries also collect data about the weather, for example to use it for scientific research, traffic information or simply to forecast the weather itself. Many of...