Open Data Maturity Report 2022: more countries are willing to unlock the potential of Open Data
Last December, leading consulting firm Capgemini released the 2022 edition of its Open Data Maturity Report, which was commissioned by the European Commission and the European Union Publications Office. This report provides an extensive assessment of the Open Data Maturity (ODM) benchmarking exercise for 2022, focusing on the maturity level of European countries for open data and documents their year-on-year progress. It also sheds light on some of the best practices implemented in European countries.
35 countries participated, including the 27 EU Member States, 3 EFTA countries (Norway, Switzerland, Iceland), 4 candidate countries (Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Ukraine) and Bosnia and Herzegovina, with an average Open Data maturity of 79%.
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.
EU Member States are preparing for the high-value datasets implementing regulation
The Open Data Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/1024) forms the basis for the reuse of data from the public sector and aims to overcome the barriers that still prevent the full reuse of public sector information. With this regulation not being implemented yet, the report highlights that Member States are well prepared when it comes to complying with the previous mentioned four dimensions of data maturity:
- 96% of EU Member States are working on identifying high-value data domains to be prioritized for publication, especially statistics, geospatial, earth observation and environment, and meteorological data categories,
- 85% of the EU27 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 high-value datasets on their portal,
- 63% of EU countries are preparing to ensure the interoperability of high-value datasets alongside available datasets from other countries.
By leveraging Open Data and exchanging experience, European countries could better respond to their common socio-economic challenges
Since the pandemic started, many countries have been leveraging Open Data for the development of statistics, dashboards and warning apps. More recently, the war in Ukraine also showed how data could be efficiently used to help solve several key challenges like:
- Human resources and skills: Several countries stress the lack of human resources allocated to open data and the absence of adequate data skills and literacy among civil servants,
- Availability of financial resources: This challenge pertains, for example, to finding recurring budget for specific datasets (e.g., high-value datasets), as well as to not having a planned budget in place,
- Coordination issues: The EU27 often report difficulties in allowing a smooth data management governance across levels of government,
- Engagement with the open data topic: Incentivising different players to provide and use open data is a challenge widely spread across the EU,
- Various aspects of publishing open data: More support, in legal, technical, and financial terms, is needed when it comes to the publication of high-quality open data.
The report also underlines that measuring Open Data impact is a priority for EU Member States, but also a big challenge. As explained, “collecting data on the impact created, especially from an economic perspective, seems to be more difficult for countries”.
Looking at some key Open Data strategies and projects
In Finland, the new government resolution on the opening up and use of public data was drafted during 2021 and published in early 2022. The Ministry of Finance’s ‘Opening Up and Using Public Data´ is facilitating processes and creating strategic documents and recommendations. The project promotes wider and more effective use of public data throughout society, while strengthening and making concrete these information policy and strategy goals.
In Malta, the national data strategy under consultation and the previous one require APIs to facilitate integration with the National Data Portal. At the same time, Malta is working on an official APIs Guidelines and Standards document to facilitate interoperability. On the other hand, real-time or dynamic data update frequency schedules are the responsibility of the register owners.
In Luxembourg, there are regular training sessions on topics such as transparency, interoperability, open data, and data management.208 The Luxembourgish National Open Data Portal insists on the importance of machine-readable formats to foster (open) data reuse and the real-life impact of data. The data.public.lu open data team also assists data providers in practice, for example with harvesting scripts and data conversion.
In Estonia, the Estonian Health Board created an application called ´weight calculator’, which compares an individual´s weight to the weight of other Estonians, Europeans and Americans, raising awareness on obesity as an important risk factor for heart diseases and facilitating more rational health-related decisions.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance implemented the BOOST tool to analyse budget indicators. Its purpose is to support the effective use of budget funds, improve decision-making processes, and increase transparency and accountability.
In Spain, ASEDIE, a multisectoral information association, annually analyses the economic and social value of companies that reuse data from the public (and private) sector to develop value-added products. According to the 2022 edition of its report, thanks to this use of data, these companies generated a sales volume of more than € 2,000 million, offering employment to almost 23,000 professionals.
In France, open business data made it possible to develop the national company directory ‘annuaire entreprises’, which relies on the open APIs exposing business data to facilitate the provision of services to companies. Another example that relies on the company identification number is the service ‘mon entreprise’ that provides simulators, calculators, and tools to help entrepreneurs
Source: Capgemini