The field of statistics has undergone centuries of advancement and continues to expand its impact. Today, applied statistics touches many things that the general public uses on a daily basis; statistical data represents a key knowledge source to support public policy making process (the so-called evidence-based policy decision making), but also to enable new value-added services across different domains looking at a large range of potential stakeholders.
Despite its fundamental role, the most of statistical data value is exploited by experts and professionals that are able to use it (e.g. to create policy and strategic reports and analysis), but there are few examples of users’ services easy to use for non-technical people. Also, at national and European level there is a lack of interoperability between the “canonical” open data provisioning systems (national/international web catalogues) and statistical portals, with different ways to access and reuse open datasets. This represents a quite relevant topic so much that UN in its 2030 Agenda talks about a “data revolution” of which a key aspect is the integration of traditional sources of information, primarily official statistics, with new sources of data including geospatial and citizen-generated data, among others.
On 1st September 2020, under the umbrella of Connecting Europe facility (CEF) grants, a consortium composed by: ISTAT – National Institute of Statistics (Italy), INSEE – National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (France), FIWARE Foundation (Germany) have kicked off an ambitious project “INTERSTAT” that will be led by one of Europe’s leading digital companies: Engineering s.p.a – Ingegneria Informatica (Italy).
INTERSTAT will achieve specific objectives performing a set of scientific, technical but also legal-related activities with the final aim of provisioning a coherent and holistic framework to enable and foster the deployment of new replicable cross-border services reusing European statistical and valuable open datasets. One and a half years pilot activities are planned in 2 different countries (but not limited to them): France and Italy.
About Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)
CEF is the Union’s programme that promotes the implementation of projects of common interest for the development, deployment, and adaptation of new services and infrastructures into 3 mainly sectors: transport, energy and, telecommunication.
Europeans still face barriers when using (cross-border) online tools and services. This means that citizens miss out on goods and services and businesses, while also governments cannot fully benefit from digital technologies.
The EU’s Digital Single Market aims to overcome these challenges by creating the right environment for digital networks and services to flourish.
To support the Digital Single Market in succeeding, the CEF programme is funding a set of generic and reusable Building Blocks which offer basic capabilities that can be reused in any European project to facilitate the delivery of digital public services across borders and sectors.
