Most EU countries are making headway in the area of open data. On a European average, they are making progress in opening up the administrations’ data treasures and are increasingly making them available in such a way that everyone can freely use, disseminate and reuse the information. This emerges from an open data report by the EU Commission, which measures the improvements made by member states in publishing open data.
Germany with slight improvements, France in the lead
In the four dimensions examined, political guidelines, effects, open data portals and quality, the EU countries have reached a pan-European level of maturity of 81 percent. That is three percentage points more than in the previous year. With a rating of 89 percent, Germany is above the European average. The researchers at the consulting company Capgemini Invent, who coordinated the report published on Friday for 2021, justify this primarily with the good results of the federal and state governments in the regulatory open data framework, the relevant strategy of the federal government and the degree of implementation.
Compared to the previous year, Germany was also able to improve in some of the other categories. It is therefore still just a “pioneer” together with other member states such as Lithuania, Norway and Denmark. In a European comparison, however, Germany falls slightly back to 15th place. France, which has been part of the leading group of “trendsetters” for six years, has pushed its way forward. With a rating of 97.5 percent, it is now considered the European country with the most advanced open data strategy.
Some European countries outside the EU also made faster progress than Germany. Norway, for example, rose from the bottom layer of “beginners” to “pioneers”. For the first time in 2021, the experts rate Ukraine as a “trendsetter”.
Germany will have to make an effort “to catch up,” said Capgemini analyst Marie Jansen. “The new federal government has a big task ahead of it. It has already laid the first cornerstone with the legal entitlement to open data set out in the coalition agreement, the formation of a data institute and the passage of a transparency law.” The task now is to quickly put the project into practice.
Sharing open data
According to the report, the Covid-19 pandemic in particular illustrated “the value and influence of open data” in the current year. Open data made it possible, for example, to raise public awareness of health issues. Many states have supplemented existing initiatives and dashboards with current statistics – for example on national vaccination rates, production capacities for vaccines or resources in intensive care. This had a “high social impact”.
According to the EU Parliament, the planned Data Governance Act (DGA) should aim to further increase trust in the shared use of data. At the same time, MEPs want to create rules on the neutrality of data marketplaces and make it easier to reuse certain information from the public sector. This concerns, for example, health, agricultural and environmental data that were previously not publicly and freely available within the framework of the existing Open Data Directive.
(olb)