More EU countries are preparing to unlock the benefits of open data

Paris, December 15, 2022 – Capgemini has published the Open Data Maturity report 2022 which benchmarks the development of European countries in the field of open data. Commissioned by the European Commission and the European Union Publications Office, the report records the year-on-year progress achieved by European countries and identifies areas for improvement. It provides insight into current best practices implemented across Europe that can be transferred to other national and local contexts and makes recommendations for speeding up open data development.

In this 8^th consecutive annual report issued by data.europa.eu^[1], 35 countries participate, including the 27 EU Member States, 3 EFTA countries (Norway, Switzerland, Iceland), 4 candidate countries (Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Ukraine) and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The average open data maturity score of the EU27 countries is 79%, across all four open data assessment dimensions – policy, impact, portal and quality. Similar to 2021 and 2020, policy is the most mature dimension (scoring 86%) in 2022.

Three major trends identified this year:

By leveraging open data and exchanging experience, European countries could better respond to their common socio-economic challenges

Leveraging open data for the development of statistics, dashboards, and warning applications has contributed to EU member States recovering from the pandemic challenge. In 2022, besides the new socio-economic consequences Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, common challenges experienced by countries in Europe are related to the lack of human resources allocated to open data and their skills; the scarcity of financial tools; coordination issues across levels of government; as well as the difficulty of incentivising the broader community to make use of open data.

A cross-border exchange of experience and knowledge among European countries could benefit the resolution of these issues, cites the report, for example the use of open data to monitor the level of energy use or to facilitate the integration of Ukrainian refugees in their labor market.

Measuring open data impact is a priority for EU Member States, but also a big challenge[2]

Countries are still scoring high in the strategic awareness indicator showcasing that the EU27 are still prioritising understanding and capturing open data reuse and value creation. While in monitoring and measuring reuse they continue to be quite advanced (EU average is 75%, similar to last year), collecting data on the impact created, especially from an economic perspective, seems to be more difficult for countries.

EU Member States are preparing for the high-value datasets implementing regulation

Although the regulation[3] has not been published yet, 96% of the EU Member States are working on identifying high-value data domains – that have a high potential economic and societal impact – to be prioritized for publication, especially statistics, geospatial, earth observation and environment, meteorological data categories. 85% of the EU 27 are already preparing to monitor and measure the level of reuse of high-value datasets and all of them aim to promote or are already promoting them on their portal. Finally, 63% of EU countries are preparing to ensure their interoperability alongside available datasets from other countries.

“Enabling open data to have an impact, economic and societal, and being able to track this impact can be considered the ultimate goal of open data efforts across Europe,” said Niels van der Linden, Account Lead for the European Union Institutions at Capgemini Invent. “The report comes at a vital time in Europe’s open data journey. It is interesting to see the strength of focus on understanding and measuring open data reuse and how most of EU countries are actively preparing to monitor high-value datasets.”

The diagram[4] below shows how the assessment scored the countries’ open data maturity, identifying four categories, from “Beginners” to “Trend-setters”.

Similar to 2021, France leads the ranking with a final score of 97%. The group of top performers is completed by Ukraine, Poland, Ireland, Cyprus, Estonia, Spain, and Italy.

The maturity of countries participating in the report is concentrated on the higher end of the spectrum (above 65%). This is highlighted by the scores of the five countries in the fast-tracker cluster, which showed similar scores concentrated in a range of 3% (88 to 91 percentage points).

About the Open Data Maturity Report

Data.europa.eu has been conducting an annual benchmarking exercise since 2015, providing European countries with an assessment of their maturity level and documenting their year-on-year progress. The objective is to support the development of countries in terms of their open data practices and enable them to learn from each other.

For more information on data.europa.eu and to view the reports visit:

• https://data.europa.eu/en/publications/open-data-maturity/2022
• https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/data.europa.eu_landscaping_insight_report_n8_2022_2.pdf

End notes:

The assessment measures maturity against four open data dimensions:

• Policy: focusing on countries’ open data policies and strategies;
• Impact: looking into the activities to monitor and measure open data reuse and its impact;
• Portal: assessing portal functions and features that enable users to access open data via the national portal and support interaction within the open data community;
• Quality: focusing on mechanisms that ensure the quality of the (meta)data.

In 2022, the report methodology underwent a revision: all four dimensions were streamlined, with the impact´s indicators being completely restructured. The methodological updates are allowing to better include policy changes related to the Open Data Directive and the implementation of high-value datasets, and to further integrate aspects such as reuse and impact creation and ensure high-quality and high-value data.

For more information, click here.

About data.europa.eu

Open data refers to the information collected, usually produced or paid for by public bodies which can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone. The benefits of open data include an increase in government transparency and accountability as well tangible social and economic benefits for citizens, businesses and civil society.

Data.europa.eu is the official portal for European open data. The portal was launched in the spring of 2021, integrating the pre-existing European Data Portal and European Union Open Data Portal into a single, coherent core component of the public sector data infrastructure that has been set up by the European Union, its institutions and Member States. Like its predecessors, data.europa.eu offers three key pillars:

• Access to public data resources across Europe via the single point of contact, which is the portal itself, offering over 1 million datasets across 36 countries, 6 EU institutions and 79 other EU bodies and agencies
• Support to EU institutions and Member States via the set-up of communities of practice of national open data portal and policy owners, training and consultancy to improve, sustain and document data publishing practices
• Evidence of the socio-economic benefits of re-using public data resources and various stimuli to foster and showcase uptake and value creation.

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[1] Data.europa.eu is the official portal for European open data. The portal was launched in the spring of 2021, integrating the pre-existing European Data Portal and European Union Open Data Portal into a single, coherent core component of the public sector data infrastructure that has been set up by the European Union, its institutions, and Member States. 

[2] In 2022, the report methodology underwent a revision: all four dimensions were streamlined, with the impact´s indicators being completely restructured. Cf “end notes” paragraph

[3] Regulation as part of the Directive (EU) 2019/1024 on Open Data and the re-use of Public Sector Information

[4] Countries Included: Georgia (GE), Slovakia (SK), Malta (MT), Montenegro (ME), Belgium (BE), Hungary (HU), Iceland (IS), United Kingdom (UK), Switzerland (CH), Portugal (PT), Luxembourg (LU), Czechia (CZ), Romania (RO), Latvia (LV), Bulgaria (BG), Greece (GR), Croatia (HR), Sweden (SE), Finland (FI), Germany (DE), Lithuania (LT), Denmark (DK), Norway (NO), Cyprus (CY), Netherlands (NL), Slovenia (SI), Italy (IT), Austria (AT), Ukraine (UA), Estonia (EE), Poland (PL), Spain (ES), Ireland (IE) and France (FR).