On the 3 November 2010 the European Commission organised in Luxembourg a technical workshop on the goals and requirements for a possible pan-European data portal. Experts with practical experience in their respective countries were invited to share their experiences and ideas and concluded that such a portal would add value to existing regional and national initiatives by improving transparency on issues of EU-wide interest.

The objectives of the meeting organized by the European Commission focused on starting a discussion with recognised experts 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 panel of experts invited by the Commission included Jose Manuel Alonso, from Fundación CTIC and co-lead of the eGovernment Interest Group at W3C, Nigel Shadbolt, from University of Southampton and member of UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board, Jonathan Gray, from the Open Knowledge Foundation, François Bancilhon, from Data Publica, Bastiaan Deblieck, from  TenForce, Jarmo Eskelinen, from the Forum Virium, Michael Hausenblas, from DERI, and Martin Kaltenböck, from Semantic Web Company.

Experts discussed over the several issues of legal, technical and socio-political nature which must be addressed for a pan-European data portal to function effectively. They pointed out that a high level of political support is crucial for that purpose, as well as the systematic adoption of reuse-friendly data licences, the promotion of established data standards for maximal interoperability and the organic involvement of European software developers and data-literate citizens.  This panel went into some of the issues which were already addressed at the debate on Governmental Linked Data at the ICT 2010 back in September 2010.

Main reasons to develop a pan-European data portal

• Transparency: all EU citizens would be able to access detailed information on EU-wide issues such as taxation, funding, crime, environment, energy, transportation, etc... and become better informed citizens in the process.
• Evidence based policy: EU institutions and Member States would be able to ground their policy decisions on empirical data open to public scrutiny and draw legitimacy in the process.
• Efficiency: experts referred to the experience of the government of a European region which has already represented as open data all its physical resources (buildings, facilities, etc...). This data set is now being jointly used by several administrations all of whom previously had to come up with and maintain their own database of resources.
• Economic development: as an example the experts mentioned geo-location and public transportation applications that have been already built on the reuse of open data.

Benefits of such portal will reach not only European citizens who will enjoy a single point of information, but also public administrations improving their availability of data and reducing administrative costs, among other reasons derived from transparency and the involvement of citizens. This type of portal will also bring new possibilities for economic development.

The experts identified two strategies which would maximise the value added of a pan-European portal, which include publishinf a catalogue of a very large number of diverse datasets, as well as integrating a small set of very high quality datasets to demonstrate its value and act as a scaffold for the integration of many other datasets.

Need for appropriate data licensing and possibilities for re-use of public sector information

Experts also identified appropriate data licensing at the precondition for any value to be extracted by data reuse, and educating data publishers on the selection of an appropriate license seems to be one of the most important requirements. This might also be a legislative issue, which should be considered in the context of the review of the Public Sector Information Directive, one of the main elements of the Digital Agenda for Europe.

Very high level political support is crucial in order to establish a culture in which government data are always published as open data unless there are good reasons to the contrary.

In conclusion, the participants agreed that a pan-European data portal would add value to open data initiatives from the Member States and would be a positive step in order to exploit the current momentum of open government data initiatives across Europe.