Published in 2019, the Open Data Directive (Directive 2019/1024) introduced the notion of high-value datasets. These are datasets from EU public sector organisations that – thanks to their reuse, especially from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – hold the potential to generate significant socioeconomic or environmental benefits as well as innovative services. As such, the Directive required that high-value datasets are made available free of charge, under open licenses (CC BY 4.0 or any equivalent or less restrictive license), via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and, where relevant, as a bulk download.
While the Directive only listed the six categories of high-value datasets (Geospatial, Earth observation and environment, Meteorological, Statistics, Companies and company ownership, Mobility), the subsequent Implementing Regulation – in force since February 2023 and applicable from June 2024 – provided the actual list of datasets to be made available by EU Member States, together with the requirements for their publication, e.g. in terms of granularity, key attributes and metadata. Three out of the six categories of high-value datasets (Geospatial, Earth observation and environment, and Mobility) include datasets with a geospatial nature, which were on purpose defined to match the datasets already in scope of the INSPIRE Directive (Directive 2007/2/EC). This is the Directive, in force since 2007 and currently under revision within the GreenData4All initiative, which established a pan-European spatial data infrastructure. INSPIRE was mostly focused on achieving data discoverability, accessibility and interoperability, but it did not provide requirements on data licensing. The result is that datasets are made available under several different reuse conditions, including only a portion of open data. Therefore, the high-value datasets Implementing Regulation is expected to add an open license requirement to INSPIRE data, thus opening up new opportunities for all stakeholders interested in reusing EU public sector data.
This talk will first describe the high-value datasets Regulation and provide an overview of the geospatial datasets in scope and the requirements on their provision. Afterwards, it will present the results of the first reporting exercise from EU Member States due in February 2025, compare the results with the indicators measuring the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive, and reflecting on lessons learnt and emerging good practices. Finally, the talk will zoom on specific and significant examples of EU public sector data that have been unlocked thanks to the Regulation and hold the potential to drive meaningful impact in various fields.