The European Commission organised a technical workshop on the goals and requirements for a possible pan-European data portal on November 3, 2010. Experts with practical experience in their respective countries were invited to share their experiences and ideas.
According to the experts, such a portal will add value to existing national and regional initiatives by improving transparency on issues of EU-wide interest. Further, they believe that the portal will help provide evidence for better policy making, improve the efficiency of data-dependent administrative and business processes and stimulate economic development through EU-wide reuse of data.
The panel of experts included Nigel Shadbolt from University of Southampton and member of UK Government's Public Sector Transparency Board; Bastiaan Deblieck from TenForce; Jose Manuel Alonso from Fundación CTIC and co-lead of the eGovernment Interest Group at W3C; Jonathan Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation; Michael Hausenblas from DERI; François Bancilhon from Data Publica; Jarmo Eskelinen from the Forum Virium; 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. These included the need for high level political support, 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.
The experts noted that a pan-European portal should be able to expand rapidly in breadth (thus fostering the interest of the public with large numbers of relevant datasets) while at the same time also showing the value of deeper data integration, starting from a core set of statistical, financial, geospatial data of high quality. Agile prototyping and development models were recommended, given the extremely fast pace at which data initiatives are developing in Europe.
The participants agreed that a pan-European data portal would be a positive step in order to exploit the current momentum of open government data initiatives across Europe, and would also add value to open data initiatives from the Member States.
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