publicdata.eu

Over the past 18 months there has been an explosion of interest in opening up official information for the public to reuse. At a national level, numerous member states now have national data catalogues, from the Digitalisér.dk data portal run by the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency to the UK’s data.gov.uk site, launched under the direction of the founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Information about European public datasets is currently scattered across many different data catalogues, portals and websites in many different languages, implemented using many different technologies. The kinds of information stored about public datasets may vary from country to country, and from registry to registry. PublicData.eu will harvest and federate this information to enable users to search, query, process, cache and perform other automated tasks on the data from a single place. This helps to solve the “discoverability problem” of finding interesting data across many different government websites, at many different levels of government, and across the many governments in Europe.