The European Commission has launched a public tender for developing an open data portal. This aims to develop and administer a web portal to act as a single point of access to data sets produced and held by European Commission services. The reuse of public information is a key element of the Digital Agenda for Europe.

The European Commission open data portal is a key project within the objectives set by the Digital Agenda for Europe. Experts from the "open data" community discussed the reuse of public sector information (PSI) and how to re-use "open data" of public administration at the "Share-PSI" workshop organized in May. In December 2010, the open data community met in Luxembourg in order to determine the expected benefits and value added of building a pan-European data portal, its technical and operational requirements as well as the next steps and activities to consider to evaluate its feasibility.

The experts met in Luxembourg agreed that the main reasons to develop a pan-European data portal are the transparency, i.e., all EU citizens would be able to access detailed information on EU-wide issues such as taxation, funding, crime, environment, energy, transportation, etc.; the evidence based policy; the efficiency and the economic development, with, as an example, public transportation applications.

In particular, the public contract tendered seeks to develop and manage the portal to act as a single point of access to data sets produced and held by European Commission services (and by extension to data sets produced and held by other European institutions/bodies and other public bodies), to assist the Commission with the definition and implementation of a data set publication process, to assist the Commission with the preparation of data sets for publication via the portal and to assist the Commission in supporting for engaging the Community interested in re-using the published data sets.

The duration of the contract is 38 months from the award of the contract and the deadline for submissions of tenders ends on 19 of September 2011.