Coupling Public Sector Information and Public-Funded Research Data in Europe: A Vision of an Open Data Ecosystem - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 277

Shadbolt, 2010), which is meant to provide a single access point for the discovery
of open data from EU Member States. Finally, the EU program “Interoperability
Solutions for European Public Administrations” (ISA)* funds a number of actions
addressing interoperability issues across levels and sectors of European public
administrations. This includes standardization activities that are meant to support
the creation of the federated data infrastructure of the pan-European Open Data
Portal, as a common metadata interchange format (EU ISA Programme, 2013).
Whereas the PSI Directive covers public sector and government data as a whole,
the INSPIRE Directive defines specific requirements for information relevant to
environmental policies or policies that may have an impact on the environment.
This is achieved by setting out a legal and technical framework for the harmo-
nization of the representation, access, and sharing of geospatial data and services
operated by Member States. Entered into force in May 2007, the adoption and
implementation of the INSPIRE Directive should be completed stepwise by 2020.
Notably, the thematic scope of INSPIRE includes themes that are also relevant
beyond the environmental domain, for example, addresses and buildings, and that
can be potentially used as a basis for supporting cross-sector interoperability.
13.2.1.1 Open Government Partnership
Unlike the above, the OGP † is a voluntary initiative at the political level, currently
involving over 60 countries (including, at the time of writing, 20 of the 28 Member
States of the EU), to stimulate national governments to adopt transparent, account-
able, and sustainable government models in response to their citizens. As the OGP's
vision claims, this requires “a shift in norms and culture to ensure genuine dialogue
and collaboration between governments and civil society.”
Each OGP member (country level) must endorse the Open Data Declaration ‡
principles, which basically aim to make government data more open and acces-
sible to citizens, and foster the use of standards throughout public administrations.
Although these principles are not legally binding, they provide minimal but well-
defined guidelines and action plans to reach the objectives. The OGP also conducts
regular monitoring activities on a number of member countries. § hese progress
reports account for the current implementation status of open data portals, measures
to facilitate publications and reuse of public data, promotion of standards, informa-
tion and communication technology (ICT) support, regulations, strategic plans, and
others. They address public administration, institutions, and agencies at national and
subnational levels and provide up-to-date information of the status quo of open-
ness, transparency, and accountability of the public sector and governmental data.
* http://ec.europa.eu/isa.
† http://www.opengovpartnership.org.
‡ http://www.opengovpartnership.org/about/open-government-declaration.
§ http://www.opengovpartnership.org/independent-reporting-mechanism.