The Open Data Maturity report 2022 shows that 85% of the EU 27 are preparing to monitor and measure the level of reuse of datasets that have a high potential economic and societal impact
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 8th consecutive annual report issued by data.europa.eu, 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
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 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.”
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).
