Enhancing the discoverability and analysis of statistical data and metadata

What is this action about?

Exposing official statistics metadata using semantic technologies and developing services for easing the discovery and analysis of official statistics

What are the objectives?

1. To improve semantic interoperability and discoverability of official statistics produced by national statistical institutes by:

• Exposing the key ESS statistical metadata assets as machine readable objects (Semantic Web);
• Packaging and deploying a set of services for statistical metadata management.

2. To improve the accessibility of EU statistics and to provide data integration and data analytic capabilities to end users and policy analysts while ensuring adequate data protection. 

What are the benefits?

• For citizens: easier access, discovery and exploration of official statistics 
• For EU institutions and other EU bodies: improve the discoverability and reuse of statistical data they publish by linking them to official statistics and other sources on the web of data 
• For EU Member States: reuse developed service and link their statistical data to other related EU data 

What has been achieved?

• Development of reference ontologies for expressing statistical data and metadata
• Development and piloting a reference architecture for metadata management and end users data services
• Release key ESS metadata assets (classifications, code lists) as semantic objects

What are the next steps?

By the end of 2020, there will be:

• Generic models to express the key statistical metadata as linked open data
• A generic architecture for the governance, maintenance and use of statistical metadata assets for key use cases like accessing data, integrating and analysing data
• The key European Statistical metadata will be exposed as linked open data
• A prototype of data analytic platform and service for accessing and analysing Open Data released by Eurostat