The platform will bring together Open Data from 39 European countries and improves the discoverability and the ability to re-use this data. With the Open Data Portal, the European Commission intends to unlock the economic potential of public data that is estimated of possible gains exceeding 40 billion Euros per year. Its further objective is to improve the governance of countries and empower citizens to address societal challenges.

“The pan-European Data Portal is likely to be the world’s most ambitious Open Data project and it will be a milestone for the cross-border and cross-sector reuse of public datasets across Europe. We are very pleased to contribute our comprehensive technical and scientific Open Data expertise to this project”, said Dr. Matthias Flügge, director of the eGovernment Competence Center ELAN at Fraunhofer FOKUS.

Fraunhofer FOKUS will be one of the key technical partners in this project, responsible for developing the data repository and harvesting datasets from existing open data sources. The data repository bundles all different data entries based on their metadata while the harvesting-tools allow to collect data sets from various sources across all the EU countries. Capgemini Consulting will lead this three-year engagement. Further partners apart from Fraunhofer FOKUS are Sogeti, Intrasoft International, the Open Data Institute, con terra, the University of Southampton and time.lex.