The development of a pan-European Open Data portal will start with the awarding of a three-year contract to a consortium of international companies. The European Commission published a call for tender in 2014 (SMART 2014/1072) to deploy a “comprehensive Open Data core platform”, the Commission said on its website. The project is funded by the Connecting Europe Facility.

The objectives of this project are to develop, deploy and operate a single Open Data infrastructure which will compile public data in Europe. The portal will cover data from 39 countries, Capgemini, one the seven international companies in the consortium, said in a statement. It will provide multi-lingual access to data published by governments, regional and local authorities throughout Europe. According to the call for tender, the project covers EU Member States, countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) and “certain other European countries”. The portal will also take into account work carried out on a previous portal (http://publicdata.eu), which is still in beta mode.

Metadata are harvested and gathered in this single portal

The international consortium is tasked with developing a metadata repository which will be the core of the platform. The technology will harvest metadata references from data published in the portal of each country. These are then included in the single pan-European platform and presented in standard format, the DCAT-AP (DCAT Application profile for data portals in Europe). This format “is a specification based on the Data Catalogue vocabulary (DCAT) for describing public sector datasets in Europe”, Joinup explains.The portal will also provide data visualisation tools and analytical reports.

The consortium will also provide services to European administrations, helping them to prepare and publish their datasets, and finally elaborate a global Open Data strategy. Knowledge sharing and training are also part of the contract to promote interaction with local communities and promote the re-use of data. Application programming interfaces (APIs) will also be provided.