Response to COVID-19 pandemic led governments to pursue initiatives that make data more accessible and insightful for European citizens.
Capgemini Invent has published its seventh annual report, measuring the level of open data maturity across Europe. The “Open Data Maturity Report 2021” details the progress achieved by European countries as they push forward with open data publication and re-use, and the different priorities they have set to enable this. The report was requested by the European Commission and the Publications Office of the European Union within the context of data.europa.eu* and was coordinated by Capgemini Invent.
Within the EU27, further improvements have been recorded in 2021 across all four open data assessment dimensions – policy, impact, portal and quality – with an overall maturity score of 81%, an increase of 3%-points on 2020 results.
The diagram below shows how the assessment scored the countries’ open data maturity, identifying four categories, from “Beginners” to “Trend-setters”.
After being a trend-setter for six years, France is now Europe’s most mature open data nation, with a score of 97.5%. Also noteworthy is the peak performance among countries outside the EU27. For example, Norway jumped from beginner to fast-tracker and Ukraine became a trend-setter in 2021.
The 2021 report identified three notable trends, recognizing both the value of open data and the need for countries to collaborate and learn lessons from each other to maximize the value of open data:
Many EU Member States continue their commitment to open data
Many Member States reported that they are in the process of, or have already completed, transposing the Open Data Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council) into their own national laws. The Open Data Directive came into force in July 2019 and is the key piece at the centre of the European Union legal framework that oversees open data, and its re-use.
In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to highlight the value and impact of open data
The 2021 assessment proved that open data creates high social impact for raising awareness on health and wellbeing related issues, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, the need to respond to the crisis led many countries to start publishing related data and developing initiatives and dashboards to make data more easily understandable and insightful for European citizens. In 2021, the initiatives and dashboards are in most cases complemented with recent statistics about national vaccination rates, vaccination production capacity, protective equipment availability, intensive care resources, etc. Therefore, this year’s assessment demonstrates a continuation and strengthening of the high social impact created by these efforts.
Understanding, monitoring, and measuring open data impact is becoming more prominent
More and more European countries are able to successfully understand and capture the extent to which open data is re-used and value is created. This is in line with one of the objectives of the Open Data Directive to reap the full potential of open data re-use. In 2021, there has been a clear trend towards conducting in-depth research, such as desk research or surveys, in order to quantify and verify open data impact. This will, in the long-term, result in a more structured and aligned approach of measuring open data impact and more accurate estimations of the impact on society and economy as a whole.
“Creating impact, whether social, economic or environmental, with the help of open data can be considered the ultimate goal of open data efforts across Europe,” said Daphne van Hesteren, Consultant at Capgemini Invent and co-author of the report. “The report shows that having the right policies in place, offering advanced portals to find data and foster interaction between publishers and re-users, and having high data quality are crucial to make re-use easier. The numerous data-driven dashboards and initiatives related to the COVID-19 pandemic are great examples of the impact that can be achieved through open data.”
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.
About data.europa.eu
Open data is information that can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone. The information is collected, produced or paid for by public bodies, private organizations and citizens. . 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.
