The European Commission has launched its open data portal, announced last year December, in public beta. While the site is already on-line, the EC has requested to not widely circulate the URL yet. The beta launch will be more widely announced in January 2013.
At launch, the EC data portal provides access to more than 5800 data sets, mostly coming from Eurostat. With this portal the EC intends to lead by example in opening up public sector information pro-actively for free re-use in Europe, as part of the European open data strategy.
The EC portal is for now aimed at publishing the EC's own data, but is at the same time a first step towards a pan-European data portal that will provide access to all underlying national (and regional, local) data portals across the 27 Member States.
The beta portal has a SPARQL endpoint to provide linked data, and will also point to applications that help work with the data (currently one application listed).
At the moment the Portal is not yet dimensioned for an important number of users, and some known issues regarding the GUI and the content still remain to be fixed in the coming few weeks. The application section also will very soon be restructured, and the current applications fixed. The European Commission is asking for feedback from a circle of early reviewers amongst the European open data community on this new open data portal.
