Towards an open government data ecosystem in Europe using common
standards
Publication Date/Time
2017-06-07T11:45:00+00:00
Governments have a large number of basic data which can be of economic
and social value to society. Along those lines, more and more European
countries are developing policies to release this data as Open
(Government) Data. In 2003, the European Union (EU) adopted
legislation to foster the re-use of Public Data in Member States via
the Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive 2003/98/EC
[http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2003:345:0090:0096:en:PDF],
which was revised in 2013 (Directive 2013/37/EU
[http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32013L0037]).
The main amendments are the adoption of the "open by default"
principle, the breakaway from cost-based charging for PSI towards a
marginal cost-oriented fee and increased transparency regarding
calculation of the fees, the inclusion of certain cultural
institutions as public sector bodies (previously outside the scope),
and support to machine-readable and open formats.

In response to the requirements of the revised PSI directive, European
public administrations have set up cross-domain and horizontal Open
Data portals. Open data portals have significantly contributed to the
establishment of the necessary foundation for a European open data
ecosystem. But limitations appeared soon. In addition to the inherent
political and cultural diversity in Europe and to multilingualism, the
development of Open Data portals has not always been coordinated
within or across countries. The use of different platforms and the
lack of common semantics have resulted in a fragmented landscape of
Open Data portals as disconnected information islands, making it hard
to exchange metadata between them. This situation leads to duplication
of information and inconsistencies, it hampers cross-portal search and
limits the discovery of datasets.

Overcoming the limitations described above was only possible if the
different portals with different descriptions of metadata would adhere
to a common metadata language. This paper describes how such a common
metadata language, DCAT-AP, was developed and implemented in national
data portals and in the European Data Portal (EDP), how implementation
challenges can be overcome and which benefits the DCAT-AP brings to
data consumers, data providers, portal owners and society as a whole.

Access the report here [https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/161966/]
