EU Open Data Portal

Launched in December 2012, the portal was formally established by Commission Decision of 12 December 2011 (2011/833/EU) on the reuse of Commission documents to promote accessibility and reuse.

Based on this decision, all the EU institutions are invited to publish information such as open data and to make it accessible to the public whenever possible.

The operational management of the portal is the task of the Publications Office of the European Union. Implementation of EU open data policy is, however, the responsibility of the Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) of the European Commission.

The portal enables users to search, explore, link, download and easily re-use data for commercial or non-commercial purposes, through a common metadata catalogue. From the portal, users can access data published on the websites of the various institutions, agencies and other bodies of the EU.

Semantic technologies offer new functionalities. The metadata catalogue can be searched via an interactive search engine (Data tab) and through SPARQL queries (Linked data tab).

Users can suggest data they think is missing on the portal and give feedback on the quality of data obtainable.

The interface is in 24 EU official languages, but most metadata are currently available in a limited number of languages (English, French and German). Some of the metadata (e.g. names of the data providers and geographical coverage) are in 24 languages.

Most of the data accessible via the EU Open Data Portal are covered by the legal notice of the Europa website. Generally, data can be used for free for commercial and non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged. Specific conditions for reuse, relating mostly to the protection of data privacy and intellectual property, apply to a small amount of data. A link to these conditions can be found for each dataset.

The terms of use can be found on the site copyright notice. As of November 2020, most data was covered by the Creative Commons CC‑BY‑4.0 license and the site metadata by the Creative Commons CC0‑1.0 public domain waiver.

The portal contains a very wide variety of high-value open data across EU policy domains, including the economy, employment, science, environment and education. The importance of these was confirmed by the G8 Open Data Charter.

So far, around 70 EU institutions, bodies or departments (e.g. Eurostat, the European Environment Agency, the Joint Research Centre and other European Commission Directorates General and EU Agencies) have made datasets available, making a total of over 13,000.

The portal also contains a gallery of applications and a visualisations catalogue (launched in March 2018).  

n the apps gallery users can find applications using EU data and developed by the EU institutions, agencies or other bodies or by third parties. The applications are displayed as much for their information value as for giving examples of what applications can be made using the data.

The visualisations catalogue offers a collection of visualisation tools, training and re-usable visualisations for all levels of data visualisation expertise, from beginner to expert.

The portal is built using open source solutions such as the Drupal content management system and CKAN, the data catalogue software developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation. It uses Virtuoso as an RDF database and has a SPARQL endpoint.

Its metadata catalogue applies international standards such as: Dublin Core, the data catalogue vocabulary DCAT-AP and the Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS).

• Open data
• European Union
• European Commission
• Institutions of the European Union
• Agencies of the European Union

1. Where do the data on the EU Open Data Portal come from?
2. Commission Decision of 12 December 2011 (2011/833/EU)
3. The team of the EU Open Data Portal
4. How to find data on the catalogue of the EU Open Data Portal
5. Legal notice
6. G8 Open Data Charter
7. Gallery of applications reusing data of the European Union
8. The EU-ODP visualisations catalogue