Unlocking the potential of open data
Publication Date/Time
2022-01-28T15:00:00+00:00
Country
Europe
European countries make progress
UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF OPEN DATA: EUROPEAN COUNTRIES MAKE PROGRESS

EVERY YEAR, EUROPEAN COUNTRIES IMPROVE THEIR OPEN DATA PRACTICES

Europe is making progress when it comes to open data. Our yearly Open
Data Maturity assessment [https://data.europa.eu/en/dashboard/2021]
shows how European countries are performing in terms of open data by
evaluating their level of maturity and tracking their progress over
time. Participating countries use it as a benchmark to find areas for
improvement and to compare themselves to others. Year after year the
Open Data Maturity assessment measures 4 dimensions: _policy, portal,
impact, and quality_.

Over the years, European countries have improved their scores from an
average maturity score of 44 % in 2015 to 81 % What has changed in
these years?

KEY TRENDS

We see that national open data portals become more user-friendly, the
quality of the data improves, open data policies are increasingly
taken up, and more impact is created. Many countries shifted their
focus from quantity of data to quality of data. We also noticed that
open data portals prioritise publishing datasets that are most
relevant for their users and datasets that serve a public interest and
benefit society. Datasets that are of high value for society might be
health-related for example, such as the French dataset on COVID-19
vaccination data
[https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/61aa0bd4af764daa5b993397?locale=en],
or related to the environment, such as the Irish water levels dataset
[https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/cd10ca75-0c16-4aec-a44a-fe6734f8373a?locale=en]
for instance.
 
 

_Figure 1_: The open data maturity scores of the 2021 assessment

How did we get here? Let’s look back on 7 years of Open Data
Maturity assessment and the progress on each dimension.

From 2015 to 2021, scores on all four measured dimensions increased
every year, yet some dimensions improved faster than others. See how
they developed in figure 2.
 
 

_Figure 2_: The open data maturity scores of the EU27

EU POLICY EFFORTS BOOST OPEN DATA REUSE

The dimension POLICY focuses on the countries’ policies and
strategies to foster open data at the national level. It has always
been the best developed. Moreover, it improved the fastest to reach an
average of 86,9 % in 2021. The high scores on this dimension can be
explained by the positive impact of EU policy. The publication of the
Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive
[https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32003L0098],
in 2003 and its recent revision: The Directive on open data and the
re-use of public sector information
[https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1561563110433&uri=CELEX:32019L1024]
stimulated open data re-use across the EU.  Slovenia performs best on
this dimension with a score of 99,2 %. Denmark, France, Ukraine, and
Italy follow closely with scores of 98,5 %. These countries are well
aware and up-to-date with the current legislation and regulation in
their country and stay on top of policy developments.

IMPACT OF OPEN DATA GROWS

The dimension IMPACT investigates how open data creates impact through
re-use. Think of applications that make use of open data to measure
air quality, such as InfluencAir [https://influencair.be/].
 

Rather than simply monitoring re-use, countries now pay substantial
attention to researching and studying the impact of re-use, resulting
in a significant increase of the maturity score from an average of 78
% in 2020 to 81 % in 2021. In 2021, Estonia, Spain, Finland, Ireland,
Italy, and Poland did exceptionally well on this dimension, achieving
a perfect score of 100 %. These countries presented great examples of
open data re-use, clearly demonstrating how open data creates
economic, political, environmental, and social impact. The Estonian
application, Tree of Truth [https://tamm.stat.ee/?lang=en] for example
helps the government monitor progress towards national goals such as
reducing emissions.
 

MANY PORTALS ARE AUTOMATING WITH APIS

The dimension PORTAL looks at the national open data portals in terms
of their features. This dimension for example assesses how a portal
enables interaction between data providers and re-users, and how
user-friendly the platform is. In 2020 and 2021 we observed that
countries are increasingly automating their portal with APIs. An API
enables advanced users to access the metadata programmatically, for
example by writing software that performs searches automatically to
identify new datasets.

THERE IS STILL ROOM TO IMPROVE ON QUALITY

In 2021, countries scored lowest on_ _QUALITY_. _This dimension
explores if national portals have a systematic and automated approach
to harvesting data, the currency, and reliability of metadata, as well
as compliance with the metadata standard DCAT-AP.

WHAT DRIVES THE SUCCESS OF THE TOP PERFORMERS?

SPAIN, A TOP PERFORMER FROM THE VERY START          

In 2015 and 2016 SPAIN ranked number 1. Why did and does the country
rank amongst the top performers? The fact that Spain has a national
open data policy in place, and a draft of the national data strategy,
contributes for a large part to their success. Also, Spain is
exceptionally active in the open data community and hosts roughly 10
events throughout the year. This significantly boosts their impact
score. The signing of the International Open Data Charter
[https://opendatacharter.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/opendatacharter-charter_F.pdf]
by the city of Madrid in 2015 also contributed to Spain’s success.
Madrid was the first European city to sign this charter, which is a
set of principles and best practices for the release of public sector
data. In the same year, the city launched the Madrid Open Data Portal
[https://datos.madrid.es/] and, a little later, the Transparency
Portal [https://transparencia.madrid.es/]. The latter shows citizens
clearly how the city government is organised and what actions they are
taking for the city in terms of urban planning and mobility for
instance.

IRELAND, A LEADING EXAMPLE OF A USER-FRIENDLY AND HIGH-TECH PORTAL

In 2017, 2018, and 2019 IRELAND ranked number 1. One of the reasons
for their success is the user-friendliness of the portal and technical
advances such as automatic harvesting. In addition, similar to Spain,
Ireland hosts regularly open data policy events. Their national open
data strategy pushes all public service organisations to create
publication plans and revise them every two years to keep them up to
date.

A nice example of how Ireland creates impact with open data is Where
Your Money Goes [https://whereyourmoneygoes.gov.ie/en/], an online
tool that anyone can use to monitor government expenses. With this
visually appealing and user-friendly tool, citizens can quickly get a
sense of how public money is spent.  
 
 

_Figure 3_: The Irish Government’s tool for monitoring expenditure:
Where Your Money Goes. 

FRANCE, MAKING THE GOVERNMENT MORE EFFECTIVE THANKS TO OPEN DATA

The 2021 winner, FRANCE, provides another great example for improving
government effectiveness.  According to the Inter-ministerial
Directorate for Digital Affairs: ‘We developed an observatory where
citizens can check how the 250 top administrative procedures score on
8 criteria, including satisfaction and accessibility. Publishing the
evaluation of the procedures helps improve the delivery of services
and increases transparency for citizens’.

CONCLUSION AND NEXT STEPS

From a bird’s eye view, we see that most European countries continue
to evolve in terms of open data policy, impact, portal, and quality.
The public sector in Europe is becoming more data-driven, digital, and
citizen-centric. Value is not just created by public bodies anymore
but co-created with citizens and private organisations. Yet the
approaches for how to get there vary as the examples show. By
assessing and showing the developments across Europe, national bodies
can learn from each other, and incentivise each other to do better.

As countries are reaching higher scores every year, the assessment
methodology approaches its limits. Therefore, it will be reviewed in
2022. Stay tuned for the publication of the 2022 edition to discover
what changed. In the meantime, check out the Open Data Maturity
section on data.europa.eu
[https://data.europa.eu/en/impact-studies/open-data-maturity].

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