The European Commission is gathering views with regard to the new open data portal recently launched in beta version. According to this European institution, this new Data Portal provides access to open public data from the European Commission. The Commission also highlights that this Data Portal promotes and builds literacy around Europe’s data.

The European Commission Open Data Portal is already on line. Márta Nagy-Rothengass, Head of Unit "Data Value Chain" in DG Connect at European Commission, highlighted that the site provides, for the first time, a single point of access to data held by different departments of the Commission, making it easy to find and retrieve datasets currently published on a multitude of different sites and portals. It currently also includes data from the European Environment Agency. Ms Nagy-Rothengass also pointed out that other institutions of the Union can publish there, and the Commission hopes that in time it will give access to data from more and more EU bodies. The announcement of the public tender for a European Commission open data portal was made in July 2011.

The Digital Agenda for Europe has identified a need to opening up public data resources for re-use. Besides legislative action, developing open data portals is a key element of the Commission's policy on Open Data, says Ms Nagy-Rothengass. She also added that work is on-going on two levels: developing a portal for data held by the Commission and other European institutions and bodies, and working towards a pan-European aggregator for data.

The Commission stressed that this portal is about transparency, open government and innovation. The published data can be downloaded by everyone interested to facilitate reuse, linking and the creation of innovative services. Moreover, the Commission stressed that data publishers, application developers and the general public can also use new functionalities enabled by the semantic technologies.