EU Commission unwraps public beta of open data portal with 5800+ datasets, ahead of Jan 2013 launch by Robin Wauters.
The EU Data Portal.
From the post:
Good news for open data lovers in the European Union and beyond: the European Commission on Christmas Eve quietly pushed live the public beta version of its all-new open data portal.
For the record: open data is general information that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone. In this case, it concerns all the information that public bodies in the European Union produce, collect or pay for (it’s similar to the United States government’s Data.gov).
This could include geographical data, statistics, meteorological data, data from publicly funded research projects, and digitised books from libraries.
The post always quotes the portal website as saying:
This portal is about transparency, open government and innovation. The European Commission Data Portal provides access to open public data from the European Commission. It also provides access to data of other Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies at their request.
The published data can be downloaded by everyone interested to facilitate reuse, linking and the creation of innovative services. Moreover, this Data Portal promotes and builds literacy around Europe’s data.
Eurostat is the largest data contributor so signs of “transparency” should be there, if anywhere.
The first twenty (20) data sets from Eurostat are:
- Quarterly cross-trade road freight transport by type of transport (1 000 t, Mio Tkm)
- Turnover by residence of client and by employment size class for div 72 and 74
- Generation of waste by sector
- Standardised incidence rate of accidents at work by economic activity, severity and age
- At-risk-of-poverty rate of older people, by age and sex (Source: SILC)
- Telecommunication services: Access to networks (1 000)
- Production of environmentally harmful chemicals, by environmental impact class
- Fertility indicators
- Area under wine-grape vine varieties broken down by vine variety, age of the vines and NUTS 2 regions – Romania
- Severe material deprivation rate by most frequent activity status (population aged 18 and over)
- Government bond yields, 10 years’ maturity – monthly data
- Material deprivation for the ‘Economic strain’ and ‘Durables’ dimensions, by number of item (Source: SILC)
- Participation in non-formal taught activities within (or not) paid hours by sex and working status
- Number of persons by working status within households and household composition (1 000)
- Percentage of all enterprises providing CVT courses, by type of course and size class
- EU Imports from developing countries by income group
- Extra-EU imports of feedingstuffs: main EU partners
- Production and international trade of foodstuffs: Fresh fish and fish products
- General information about the enterprises
- Agricultural holders
When I think of government “transparency,” I think of:
Remembering it isn’t the “EU” that makes a decision for good or ill for you.
Some named individual or group of named individuals, with input from other named individuals, with who they had prior relationships, made those decisions.
Transparency in government would name the names and relationships of those individuals.
BTW, I would be very interested to learn what sort of “innovation” you can derive from any of the first twenty (20) data sets listed above.
The holidays may have exhausted my imagination because I am coming up empty.