It is that time of the year again. With the end of the year approaching fast, activities for the holiday season are already planned and everything is geared up for Christmas. Many European city centres come alive during this period with the arrival of a Christmas market, festive gatherings at the town's central squares or places and a sign the year is running to its end. Originating in Germany, Christmas markets can now be found throughout Europe. With great food, warming drinks, traditional gifts and live music Christmas markets attract many visitors, with Dortmund and Cologne for instance

With December around the corner, people all over Europe are preparing themselves for winter traditions and gatherings such as New Year Eve, Christmas or other activities. While most of these activities are taking place in the warmth of everybody's houses, for many it is also the time of the year to go outside and have fun in the snow. Many of Europe's mountains will soon be covered in snow and be ready for activities such as skiing or snowboarding. Although not all countries are mountainous enough for ski runs, many of them do collect information about snow. With the snowmonths around the

Open Data is made available in a wide variety of domains and for various reasons. One of the main reasons governments provide their citizens with Open Data is transparency. For example the city of Los Angeles has published data about accidents on its streets. Journalists have developed maps of the location of these accidents. Citizens understand now better that when construction is taking place at a specific crossing in the city causing delays or road closure, it will increase the safety which is needed because of the amount or severity of traffic accidents taking place at that location. In

With August coming to its end, also the summer weather is about to leave and autum will soon arrive. While the last week of August is treating Europe well with some (last) rays of sunlight, the weather is about to change. All European countries also collect data about the weather, for example to use it for scientific research, traffic information or simply to forecast the weather itself. Many of these countries also publish this data as Open Data, sharing the information with others. The data sets with metereological information come in many forms, content and angles. For example, Luxembourg

The 31st Modern Olympic Summer games will start in Rio de Janeiro. Until the 21st of August, more than 10,000 athletes from over 200 different countries will compete in 28 different sports. This year there are three new sports introduced: golf, sevens rugby and kite surfing. The Olympic Games show that sport fanatics can be found around the whole world. But what if you are visiting a country and you would still like to keep on doing your favourite sport, how do you know where to go? The solution for this is Open Data. There is Open Data available on all types of sport facilities, for example

Between September 18 and September 20th, the INSPIRE 2018 conference took place in Antwerp Belgium. The motto of this year's edition was "INSPIRE users: Make it work together!" Following this motto, the European Data Portal facilitated a thinkathon on Wednesday September 19 th. The thinkathon - an interactive workshop format - created a new 'space' for the conference participants to 'make it work together'. The idea of a thinkathon is inspired by the hackathon format: It is a chance for people to come together in a thinking session for creative problem solving. The EDP team decided to

New technologies have made it possible to expose cultural heritage on digital platforms. However, until this moment only a small fraction of the cultural institutions worldwide digitised their material and made it openly available. You can read more about the importance of digitisation of open cultural heritage and its re-use. In fostering the process of digitisation of cultural heritage, cultural institutions can benefit from governmental organisations that fuel the policy debate on the topic and take measures to bring stakeholders in the cultural sector together to improve the framework

Background and aim of the PSI directive and its revision The aim of the PSI Directive on re-use of Public Sector Information is to foster and guide the re-use of Public Sector Information (PSI). The directive advocates making more public sector data and public research data available at higher quality to increase the reusability. A solid framework guides which data needs to be open and how potential costs can be calculated. In order to update the directive to fit the development in PSI re-use, the European Commission adopted a proposal for a revised PSI Directive. The proposal aims at

AI and data: a crucial combination Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has the capacity to extract deeper insights from datasets than other techniques. Examples of AI are: speech recognition, natural language, processing, chatbots or voice bots. To get AI applications to work, big sets of high quality (open) data are necessary. But what requirements does this data have to meet? To answer this question, we need to look more closely at what requirements data need to have to enable successful AI applications. Use of Open Data for AI Access to (open) data can unlock the potential of AI

What is the background of the GDPR? As technologies develop and more and more data are produced and collected, several initiatives seize the potential of the data by re-using it to gain insight or provide new products and services. Mobile applications can, for example, tell users when it will rain in which area by linked weather and geo data. Websites on public procurement provide inside on public spending and decision making. Others combine bus and train schedules and routes to improve public transport and smart city initiatives. Most of the data that is re-used is Open Data not including