“Data Week ” is the spring gathering of the European Big Data Value and Industrial AI research and innovation community. This year, Data Week held online from 25th to the 27th of May. The event followed the tradition of the Big Data Value Summit, promoting opportunities, knowledge sharing and fostering ecosystem development. 

At this important event, the INTERSTAT consortium promoted a workshop on the value of public data where prestigious speakers, such as Dr. Emanuele Baldacci – director of methodology, IT and corporate statistical services at Eurostat – participated and brought their strong contributions on data management.

The aim of the workshop is to present and discuss a set of data initiatives of the European Union, in particular the increase of the availability, quality and usability of public sector high value datasets in compliance with the Open Data Directive. This goes in the direction of a Public Data Space, in particular to better support G2B and G2C services, looking at AI applications and there-use and combination of open public data across the EU for the development of information products and services, including AI applications.

To this aim, the European Commission is fostering the release of High Value Datasets (HVDs) held by the public sector via APIs in machine-readable format (FAIR principles) for the creation of data products and services and for their use by the participants in the common European data spaces. This will help more companies, in particular SMEs and start-ups to use cross- EU data to scale up and offer EU-wide services, benefiting from the size of the EU’s digital market. The easy availability of machine-readable data in bulk or via APIs will also greatly facilitate machine learning based on public data, especially in the data-demanding areas such as climate change, pollution or weather predictions. In addition, the applicable data sharing rules for selected HVDs belonging to Geospatial,Earth observation and environment, Meteorological domains will complement the provisions of the INSPIRE Directive, further supporting the Green Deal related activities.

What have been the Take-aways from the workshop?

• Join the ‘Living-in.eu’ community by either becoming a signatory or supporter: https://living-in.eu/declaration
• Explore the possibilities for funding for a ‘data space for climate-neutral and smart communities’ under the DIGITAL programme,
  during the ‘Leading the Digital’ event on 02/06/2021: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/leading-digital-decade
• Expert group on sustainable data access for statistics to prepare preliminary report by the Summer and final report early 2022
  (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/expert-group-facilitating-use-new-data-sources-official-statistics_en)
• Support development/reuse of (statistical) tools and methods for secure data disclosure and privacy enhancing technologies in
  the new Single Market Programme (https://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market_en)
• “Data from and for Society” event (3 and 4 June 2021). The event will focus on the relevance and benefits of using public and
  privately held data in the production of statistics as public good for society
  (https://www.2021portugal.eu/en/events/high-level-event-data-from-and-for-society/)
• The INTERSTAT project is driving the “CEF Open Data project cluster”, an initiative to create sinergy among some of the projects funded under the CEF-Telecom Open Data call 2019. It includes: INTERSTAT, ODALA, YODA, WHOW.