EU open data: fuelling digital innovation
The European Big Data Value Forum
[https://european-big-data-value-forum.eu/2022-edition/about/] (EBDVF)
is the flagship event organised annually by the Big Data Value
Association [https://www.bdva.eu/] (BDVA) to bring together the whole
European data-driven AI research and innovation community to share
knowledge, collaborate and celebrate achievements in the field.  This
year, the EBDVF took place in Prague (Czech Republic) between the 21st
and 23rd of November. Under the theme ‘At the heart of the Ecosystem
for Data and AI’, the programme
[https://european-big-data-value-forum.eu/2022-edition/programme/]
involved several keynote speeches, presentations, and co-creative
workshops on ‘Data Spaces’, ‘Industrial and Trustworthy AI’,
‘Technology, Platforms and Impact’, or ‘Data, AI and the new
society’.

Inmaculada Farfan Velasco (project manager at the EU Publications
Office [https://op.europa.eu/en/home]) was also among the speakers,
delivering a keynote speech on ‘EU open data: fuelling digital
innovation’ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKq5y03eFKA]. In a
world characterised by an increasing supply and demand of data,
governments and businesses need to re-evaluate their strategies and
business models to make the most out of this ‘data explosion’.
Going towards a ‘data-use culture’ is also fundamental for
citizens, who can make better decisions based on the free access to
information. Open data, as ‘data sharing at its peak’, is key to
enable this bigger picture and can bring several benefits to both the
public and private sectors, including enabling economic growth and job
creation or increasing transparency and accountability of public and
private entities.

The power of the ‘butterfly effect of open data’ lies in the
infinite forms which this data can re-invent itself in. A clear proof
of this effect is given by the innovative applications developed every
year by researchers and developers participating in the EU Datathon
[https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eudatathon] organised by the EU
Publications Office. For example, one of the winners of the EU
Datathon 2020, Geofluxus [https://www.geofluxus.com/], tackled the
challenge of the European Green Deal
[https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en]
by developing a visualisation tool that uses different kinds of EU
open data (e.g. customs, trade etc.) to help local governments and
enterprises in the Netherlands better monitor waste management. By
serving as catalogue of metadata that is harvested by open data
portals across Europe, data.europa.eu was key for the development of
Geofluxus and many other data-driven examples.

To best support the wide community of data providers and reusers,
data.europa.eu is constantly improving itself. From a new interface
design
[https://data.europa.eu/en/news-events/news/redesign-and-new-features-dataeuropaeu]
to the re-allocation of its services into four areas:

 	* DATA ACCESS – Providing access to more than 1.5 million free
open datasets
[https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets?locale=en&minScoring=0] and free
public data documentation
[https://dataeuropa.gitlab.io/data-provider-manual/] across Europe via
a single platform;
 	* LEARNING – Offering training courses and webinars to increase
the understanding of open data, its benefits, its applications as well
as targeting specific users´ needs. For example, this is done through
our series of webinars for data providers
[https://data.europa.eu/en/academy/learning-corner-data-providers],
available on our knowledge hub, data.europa academy
[https://data.europa.eu/en/academy];
 	* RESEARCH – Providing insightful publications on technical,
legal, and policy aspects of open data, such as the yearly open data
maturity [https://data.europa.eu/en/publications/open-data-maturity]
assessment, whose 2022 edition will be published on 14 December.
 	* CONNECT – Supporting data providers from EU institutions, EU
Member States and European countries in publishing (meta)data and
encouraging reuse among the broader community, including businesses
and  citizens, for example through competitions like the EU Datathon
[https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eudatathon].

Do you want to learn more about the data.europa.eu and its services?
Read the news iece dedicated to its new features
[https://data.europa.eu/en/news-events/news/redesign-and-new-features-dataeuropaeu]
and the latest data story on the role of the portal to increase
digital skills and data literacy
[https://data.europa.eu/en/publications/datastories/towards-2023-european-year-skills].

 

To stay updated on our learning activities and publications, follow us
also on Twitter [https://twitter.com/EU_opendata], Facebook
[https://www.facebook.com/data.europa.eu] and LinkedIn
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/publications-office-of-the-european-union/],
and subscribe to our newsletter
[https://data.europa.eu/en/newsletter].

 Share the article:

Publication Date/Time
2022-12-09T08:00:00+00:00
Find out the insights of our intervention at European Big Data Value
Forum on 23 November