An easy way to find European open data

Guy and a girl looking at a laptop

With the TransparencyCamp Europe App Competition we call on developers and data crunchers to create, develop and submit web applications, mobile apps or online tools that utilise public sector information and open data to benefit people.

The coming months, we’re posting a number of datablogs to help you find the data you need and are curious to know what data you’re missing in creating apps that you have in mind. As a starter, two months ago, the European Union unveiled its open data portal that allows the public sector in 32 European countries to share open datasets.

The European data portal

The European data portal brings public data from all over Europe into one central place, currently holding roughly 400,000 datasets from European countries sourced from national, regional, local and domain-specific public data providers. This portal includes 68 catalogs and 13 categories such as government and public sector, justice, legal system and public safety, health, transport, economy and finance.

Countries and regions and institutions

You can find data you need for creating open data apps as the portal offers access to data published by public administrations from 34 countries, including 28 EU member states, the European Economic Area, Switzerland and countries in the EU Neighbourhood Policy programme. Besides data from national and regional catalogs, you can also find open data of the institutions and other bodies of the European Union.

Formats

The data you can find on the European data portal comes in various formats, like CSV, JSON and XML, however, not all formats are machine-readible (like PDF). Actually, the availability of machine-readable data on national portals is relatively low. Only 15% of the European catalogs have more than 75% of their data available in machine-readable format. Some datasets are also accessible via APIs. Take a look at WFS for geographic data or this generic list of APIs. Furthermore, the Eurovoc Thesaurus allows multilingual searching by data category and the portal provides an advanced search function for the discovery of public open data by geographical location.

Diplohack Athens opens up black box of Europe!

Datablog

Last weekend the first-ever Diplohack of Greece was held in Athens. Supported by the Embassy of Ireland, the Netherlands Embassy in Athens organized this event together with the local Impact Hub, in context of the Netherlands’ Presidency of the EU Council. During the event journalists, diplomats, programmers, creative thinkers and enthusiast civil society representatives gathered,

Who is who in EU institutions?

Datablog

If you are making an application which makes the European Union more transparent, then you might want to incorporate information about its institutions, who work there and how your users can contact them. This information is available at the EU Whoiswho website, but this data is not easily reusable. That is why we scraped it

Let’s have a look at the EU’s financial data

Datablog

Crawling through information on EU budgets, finances, funds, contracts and beneficiaries, you’ll notice there is much room for improvement. Let’s have a look at financial data of the European Union. The Budget of the European Union Let’s start with the budget. The budgets of 2013, 2014 and 2015 can be retrieved as open datasets in

Transparent EU decision-making

Datablog

Decision-making in the EU needs to become way more transparent. Still, there is already quite some open data available, differing in quality and ease of use. We challenge you to take this data and combine it with other sources to create innovative tools which increase transparency, improve ease of use and show the value of





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