[open-government] Feedback on the EU Open Data Portal

Mon Jul 8 14:57:30 UTC 2013

Hi,

I've finally found a trivial amount of time to look at how the portal is 
coming along. It's looking nice ad the fact that I've only got nit-picks 
is a definite positive!

A purely personal opinion - being rather slow on things I'm afraid I 
didn't immediately realise that the bulk of the home page is taken up 
with a video, I saw it as a simple graphic of a file icon. I'd prefer to 
see the video window smaller and the welcome text above the fold.

I was looking at the worksheet specification you link to from the linked 
data page. The info on ADMS needs updating - version 0.98 to which you 
refer was quite some time ago. ADMS is now a W3C Note, see 
http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-adms/. It's now fully aligned with DCAT 
(which is about to go to second last call) and the ORG Ontology.

I imagine you're already aware of the work being done to define a DCAT 
profile for European portals? That's where you get things like values 
from controlled vocabularies, cardinalities etc. See (and please do 
comment on) 
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/asset/dcat_application_profile/asset_release/dcat-application-profile-data-portals-europe-final-draf

Separately, I'm always interested to see what linked data is being 
published so I used the rdf/xml format link at the side of the full list 
of data. All 11 data sets listed when I do that are from DG SANCO I 
believe. I didn't check every one but three three I did check were all 
zip files containing a mixture of files with .xml and .json extensions. 
The former really ought to be .rdf (I hope the portal doesn't have some 
silly restriction like only allowing certain extensions of which .rdf 
isn't one :-) ) And I can't see the context files for the JSON (the URIs 
give 404s). There are other 404s around as well but that's always the 
way with supplied data. For example, 
http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/dataset/AcyIY83g1opyyupLt7lA gives 
the URL for additional info as 
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/health_consumer/datasets/food/rasff which is a 404.

Is SANCO supplying data as RDF/XML and JSON-LD or are you converting it? 
If the latter, can you output Turtle as well? (RDF-heads really don't 
like RDF/XML... ;-) )

Sorry to be so brief - it's looking better all the time.

Cheers

Phil.

On 28/06/2013 17:45, Christian Villum wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> We are currently *putting together a summary on the EU Open Data Portal (EU
> ODP) <http://open-data.europa.eu/>* that was launched earlier this year -
> as a single point of access to a growing range of data from the
> institutions and other bodies of the European Union.
>
> By providing easy and free access to data, the portal aims to promote their
> innovative use and unleash their economic potential. It also aims to help
> foster the transparency and the accountability of the institutions and
> other bodies of the EU.
>
> For the summary, which will be presented to the European Commission, we are
> *inviting feedback from the community*; specifically we would be interested
> in hearing about:
>
> - General opinions on the EU ODP and it's ability to fill the
> above-mentioned aims
> - Uses of the data from the EU ODP; existing case stories or planned future
> uses
> - The launch; was the portal announced properly and appropriately and in
> the right channels?
>
> Please help us by voicing your opinion, so we can provide good and useful
> feedback on the portal.
>
> -Christian
>
>
>
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-- 

Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1