Have you ever wondered how similar different regions across Europe are? What a southern European urban region could have in common with a rural area in eastern Europe? EU Twinnings is a web application that allows the user to engage with European regions by exploring how similar they are. It’s a ‘virtual twinning’ platform that uses EU open data to calculate and visualise a similarity measure. European migration experience The origins of the app date back to the EU Datathon 2020, when its developer Giuseppe Sollazzo started to explore the concept of similarity by reflecting on his own life as

Using open data to understand politics Looking to attract readers, media fill their sites with polls, news articles and opinions about the latest political events. These include elections. The message brought by different media outlets can vary markedly and it can be hard to distinguish the ordinary from the extraordinary. Open data became a valuable tool to help put election outcomes into the right context. For example, during the 2019 European elections, the Greens obtained 12% of the votes. One media outlet described this result as a surge of support. Comparing the 2019 and 2014 elections

Rising prices - the consumer’s view Inflation has become a news headline in Europe, with Eurostat reporting that the average increase in prices from last year was 8.1%. At the same time, consumers see price increases for some everyday items increasing by substantially more. Petrol prices in Germany, for example, have increased by more than 20% since last year. In the Netherlands, the price for meat has increased by more than 10% from last year, surpassing price increases in other categories. Inflation captures the average person buying an average number of goods and services—but a meat-loving

The United Nations Refugee Agency estimated that around 10 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes since the Russian invasion of 24 February 2022. This figure represents almost a quarter of the total Ukrainian population of 44 million inhabitants. Many of those people fled to other regions of Ukraine, away from the fights, while over 5.7 million left the country entirely to seek haven abroad. It is the largest humanitarian crisis in Europe since the end of the Second World War. The flow of refugees from Ukraine is different from other migration flows in the past. Many of the

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is the practice of collecting and analysing information gathered from open sources to produce actionable intelligence. This intelligence can support, for example, national security, law enforcement and business intelligence. OSINT investigates open (source) data collected for one purpose and repurposes it to shed light on hidden topics. The whole concept of OSINT sounds counter intuitive—using open data to reveal information that organisations want to keep secret. In the war in Ukraine, OSINT has been used to get a better idea of the movements of Russian

The 2021 edition of the Open Data Maturity assessment has shown peak performances across all European countries, with the EU27 average maturity score reaching 81%, i.e., 3 percentage points more than in 2020. Among the top performers of this edition, Estonia, Slovenia, and Ukraine were highlighted in the 2022 report “ Open Data Best Practices : Estonia, Slovenia & Ukraine”. To explore their impressive growth in maturity score and encourage knowledge sharing across countries, a data.europe.eu academy webinar was recently organised. Although the Ukrainian open data team was not able to attend

Data.europa.eu runs its annual EU Datathon to bring together open-data enthusiasts and application developers in a competition to show how open data can solve real-world problems. In 2021, the Datathon was divided along three “societal challenges”—long-term problems facing society that need to be solved. These challenges were about environmental sustainability and the European Green Deal; economic equity and an economy that “works for people”; and how to better digitalise Europe. Speaking with one of the winners of the competition, however, it becomes clear that gaps in open-data sets hold

Unlocking the potential of open data: European countries make progress Every year, European countries improve their open data practices Europe is making progress when it comes to open data. Our yearly Open Data Maturity assessment shows how European countries are performing in terms of open data by evaluating their level of maturity and tracking their progress over time. Participating countries use it as a benchmark to find areas for improvement and to compare themselves to others. Year after year the Open Data Maturity assessment measures 4 dimensions: policy, portal, impact, and quality

On a mission to shape our digital future The first ever EU Open Data Days took place from 23 to 25 November 2021. The event hosted EU DataViz , an international conference on open data and data visualisation, and the annual open data competition, EU Datathon . Why the EU Open Data Days? An increasing number of states and governments around the world recognise the value of open data and take initiative to publish open data sets. The European Union makes no exception. On the contrary, according to the European data strategy presented by the European Commission in February 2020, the EU ‘aims to

To make scientific breakthroughs possible and tackle complex issues, we need collaborative and open science. The European Commission’s (EC) programme Horizon 2020 was created to fund projects contributing to scientific openness. How well has it achieved its goal? How open are the data and the research created by Horizon 2020 funded projects? What is Horizon 2020 ? The EC’s Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) is one of the world’s largest funding programmes for research and innovation. It is succeeded by the Horizon Europe programme (2021 –2027). The Horizon programmes aim to produce world-class science