Improving EU data reusability and visualisation

What is this action about?

EU institutions produce, gather and publish an increasing amount of data on the EU Open Data Portal. As a result, there is a growing need for effective data management and visualisation tools. Under this ISA² action, the Publications Office of the EU, together with the EU institutions and agencies, will develop a common approach to sharing knowledge about the processing, treatment, and publishing of open data, in order to increase its reusability. In addition, the EU will develop a catalogue of visualisation tools to more effectively visualise and share data.

What are the objectives?

This action aims to facilitate the reuse of data, to further open-up data, to increase data interoperability, and to improve data visualisation through:

• developing guidelines, documentation and training materials
• providing support, advice and training
• creating a catalogue of shareable visualisation tools, such as applications and libraries
• supporting the transformation of data into Linked data, i.e. connecting information from different sources
• setting up a framework for the persistent identification of data

What are the benefits?

For citizens

• better data quality
• more and better data visualisations

For EU institutions and other EU bodies

• a knowledge base on open data publishing, treatment, processing and visualisation
• a single point of access to visualisation tools as the first step towards corporate visualisation solutions
• a governance structure, implementation guidelines and the development of a toolbox for persistent identification
• building an inter-institutional community of open data and data visualisation experts
• improved overall data publishing

For Member State portals and other portals

• the possibility to use the developed guidelines and tools

What has been already achieved?

• In 2017, the action created a common toolset for data visualisation and reuse-oriented data management and data treatment (in particular linked open data).

• In 2018, the catalogue of data visualisation has become part of EU Open Data Portal and new functionalities have be incorporated.

• A series of training courses, webinars and workshops on data visualisations were organised. All materials are reusable and published on Joinup.

• The data visualisation catalogue (beta version) was integrated into EU ODP.

• The EU budget was converted into RDF format and published on EU Open Data Portal. The project was presented in a webinar (available on Joinup) and in a conference.

• The EU Datathons 2018 and 2019 were organised successfully via prize funding from ISA². The participants found various innovative ways on how to visualise EU open data and how to link it with other data sources to extract more value and new insights.

What are the next steps?

In 2020, the project aims to provide a sustainable service package to data providers of the EU ODP (EU institutions, agencies and other bodies) and other stakeholders of the EU ODP, e.g. the European Data Portal and its affiliated Member State data portals. It will enable them to enhance their data visualisation capacity, enhance collaboration in the areas across organisational borders, and to further open up their data as well as to increase data quality and interoperability in view of better data reusability in the years to come.