Abstract

Eurostat’s data publication approach is guided by Eurostat’s overall mission to ‘provide high-quality statistics for Europe’. The concrete initiatives are defined in line with the European Statistical Programme, the Eurostat Strategic Plan as well as the principles of the European Statistics Code of Practice, and are shaped by the policies and priorities of the European Commission.

The European Data Strategy, released in February 2020, emphasizes the importance of open data in driving innovation, improving public services, and promoting transparency. The strategy sets out a number of goals related to open data, aiming to enhance data reuse, sharing, interoperability, and to create common data spaces.

In addition to the mentioned documents and policies, Eurostat’s data publication approach takes into consideration newly emerging developments and requirements, which have recently included the digital transformation, a growing demand for new statistics to measure societal phenomena, users’ changing habits and expectations.

Following the European Commission and ESS policies and strategic objectives and with the goal of improving the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse of its data as per the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship (https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/), Eurostat has recently introduced a number of improvements to its data dissemination products. This includes the modernisation of existing and introduction of new data dissemination products (Eurostat website, new data browser), publication of datasets on data.europa.eu, use of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for dataset descriptions, use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for Eurostat datasets, storing SDMX artefacts needed to share and interpret statistical data and metadata exchanged in the ESS in the Euro SDMX Registry, disseminating statistical classifications in RDF format to make them widely reusable as Linked Open Data (LOD).

The roles and responsibilities of official statistics producers to support and empower different societal groups by providing reliable, objective and accessible statistics so that they can make informed decisions continue to grow. Easy access to and reuse of open data is key to this endeavour. In this presentation, Eurostat’s joint efforts with its ESS and EU partners to make European statistics widely accessible to a broad public and improving the interoperability, integration and standardisation of the related processes will be shared.