52°North is member of consortium awarded 6-year contract to continue the development of the European Data Portal

The European Union’s framework contract award highlights the strategic position of the project consortium in the field of Insights & Data to drive innovation across Europe

The Publications Office of the European Union has awarded a six-year framework contract to Capgemini Invent to continue the development of the European Data Portal and related consultancy and research work into a new service: Data.Europa.EU. It will combine the two European data portals, and their efforts towards facilitating open data publication and re-use in Europe.

Capgemini Invent, the digital innovation, consulting and transformation brand of the Capgemini Group, will lead the six-year engagement, coordinating the project consortium.

The new Data.Europa.EU, to be launched in spring of 2021, will integrate the pre-existing European Data Portal and European Union Open Data Portal into a single, coherent core component of the public sector data infrastructure that has been set up by the European Union, its institutions and Member States. Like its predecessors, it will offer three key pillars:

• Access to public data resources across Europe via the single point of contact, which is the portal itself, offering over 1 million datasets across 36 countries, 6 EU institutions and 79 other EU bodies and agencies;
• Support to EU institutions and Member States via the set-up of communities of practice of national open data portal and policy owners, training and consultancy to improve, sustain and document data publishing practices;
• Evidence of the socio-economic benefits of re-using public data resources and various stimuli to foster and showcase uptake and value creation.

The goal of Data.Europa.EU is to leverage this three-pillar approach to support the creation and improvement of processes, products and services re-using public data resources to create economical, societal, political, and environmental impact. The more this impact is documented and understood, the further access, discoverability and data uptake will increase. The latest Capgemini Invent study published in 2020 as part of the European Data Portal estimated a value between 199 (baseline scenario) and 334 (high growth scenario) billion EUR in market size for open data in Europe in 2025.

“52°North is thrilled to be able to pursue our successful cooperation with con terra and Capgemini Invent to continue the development of the European Data Portal. We look forward to providing our expertise in handling spatial data and to investigating how new data sources, such as near-real time data can be made discoverable,” says Dr. Simon Jirka, Project Manager at 52°North.

Beyond delivering improvements to the pre-existing two services, the agreement will continue including the measurement of open data maturity in Europe and the socio-economic impact of open and shared data in Europe in light of the current and planned developments. Assistance will be given equally to European countries where specific attention should be paid to improving the discoverability of data and improving data portals to foster re-use of public data resources within each respective country and community.

52°North will cooperate closely with con terra to develop a component for the map-based visualization of geospatial data. In addition, our research software engineers will contribute to the further development of the underlying data infrastructure, for example by exploring how to best integrate near-real time data streams.

Capgemini Invent leads the project’s Consortium, in partnership with INTRASOFT International, including Fraunhofer FOKUS, OMMAX, con terra, 52°North, agiledrop, Timelex, the Lisbon Council, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and Capgemini’s global design leader Idean and the Cybersecurity Services.

 

About 52°North

Spatial Information Research

52°North is a private non-profit R&D organization. Our mission is to increase the value of geodata and geographic information technologies in science, business and public administration through applied research and knowledge-intensive services.

Our research software engineers have a strong background in both applying scientific methods and excellent software engineering practices. They have extensive knowledge regarding state-of-the-art technologies and Geo-IT trends, such as cloud native technologies, Geo-AI or big data analytics. We contribute to research and innovation projects and provide professional services to build operational high-end Geo-IT solutions.