PublicData.EU Launched During DAA
From the post:
During the Digital Agenda Assembly this week in Brussels the new portal PublicData.EU was launched in beta. This is a step aimed to make public data easier to find across the EU. As it says on the ‘about’ page:
“In order to unlock the potential of digital public sector information, developers and other prospective users must be able to find datasets they are interested in reusing. PublicData.eu will provide a single point of access to open, freely reusable datasets from numerous national, regional and local public bodies throughout Europe.
Information about European public datasets is currently scattered across many different data catalogues, portals and websites in many different languages, implemented using many different technologies. The kinds of information stored about public datasets may vary from country to country, and from registry to registry. PublicData.eu will harvest and federate this information to enable users to search, query, process, cache and perform other automated tasks on the data from a single place. This helps to solve the “discoverability problem” of finding interesting data across many different government websites, at many different levels of government, and across the many governments in Europe.
In addition to providing access to official information about datasets from public bodies, PublicData.eu will capture (proposed) edits, annotations, comments and uploads from the broader community of public data users. In this way, PublicData.eu will harness the social aspect of working with data to create opportunities for mass collaboration. For example, a web developer might download a dataset, convert it into a new format, upload it and add a link to the new version of the dataset for others to use. From fixing broken URLs or typos in descriptions to substantive comments or supplementary documentation about using the datasets, PublicData.eu will provide up to date information for data users, by data users.”
PublicData.EU is built by the Open Knowledge Foundation as part of the LOD2 project. “PublicData.eu is powered by CKAN, a data catalogue system used by various institutions and communities to manage open data. CKAN and all its components are open source software and used by a wide community of catalogue operators from across Europe, including the UK Government’s data.gov.uk portal.”
Here’s a European marketing opportunity for topic maps. How would a topic map solution be different from what is offered here? (There are similar opportunities in the US as well.)