By Gefion Thuermer – KCL
The European Data Portal (EDP) is the central portal for open data in the EU, harvesting metadata on datasets from all of the national open data portals and making it available and searchable in a central location.
The EDP team just wrapped up a webinar series to discuss: The Future of Open Data Portals, co-organised by MediaFutures’ Technical Lead, Professor Elena Simperl, and with contributions from the Open Data Institute. The series covers topics such as open data publishing, searching, and ecosystems, and contains current best practices, experience and opportunities for collective action to ensure open data portals remain relevant and useful for the community they serve.
Data, including open data, is central to MediaFutures and our mission to reshape media value chains. Traditionally, open data portals have looked at impact through the lens of the number of datasets published or downloaded by users. The EDP team believes that we need a shift in portal design and value proposition from a tool for publishing, with search as an enabling feature, to a community of like-minded parties, working with data. This requires new concepts and ideas on how portals should be built, and which features they should prioritise.
The Future of Open Data Portal series of eight 45-minute webinars features speakers from the EDP team and the broader community. It addresses technical, human factors, funding and sustainability topics. The recordings of the webinars are all free to access on the EDP website.
Webinar 1 – The future of open data portals: the EDP view
Elena Simperl discussed insights from the experience of the EDP.
Webinar 2 – From an Open to an Enterprise Data Catalogue and back
Juan Sequeda from data.world discusses data catalogs in the context of open data versus catalogues for real world enterprise data lakes.
Webinar 3 – Supporting open data publishers
Deirdre Lee from Derilinx shares insights about how to support open data publishers based on Derilinx’s experience managing the Irish open data portal.
Webinar 4 – The Google Dataset Search Engine
Natasha Noy from Google AI presents her team’s experience developing the Google Dataset Search Engine.
Webinar 5 – Building the Kaggle community: How we created a data science ecosystem
Julia Elliot speaks about the creation of communities around shared datasets in the context of data science and machine learning competitions.
Webinar 6 – The challenges of building an user-centered open data portal
Mathilde Hoang speaks about open data in France.
Axel Polleres from the Institute of Information Business of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) shares insights on the Open Data Portal Watch and their work monitoring and analysing open data portals.
Webinar 8 – Data Doesn’t Drive (People Do)
Lucy Knight from the Open Data Institute and The Data Place discusses how open data can build local partnerships.