(Revised) PSI Directive Theme: Techniques

The (Revised) PSI Directive mandates EU member states to open-up public sector information, previously inaccessible to citizens. An increasing number of governmental, non-governmental or private organizations therefore publish sets of data in public space, covering domains such as healthcare, education, cultural heritage, financial, transportation etc.

Once on the Web, data become the bridge between data owners / publishers and the data consumers, which raises several technical challenges on both sides, such as: how to make the published data searchable, discoverable, machine-readable or accessible? What formats are appropriate for publishing data? How can data owners increase the interoperability of published data? What techniques / tools exists to cope with modifications of data already published?

To address these issues, we seek to provide guidance to stakeholders, through a set of good practices that apply to multiple technologies, that aims at improving the consistency in the way data is published and consumed on the Web. Providing structured metadata, using well-established ontologies, implementing data versioning, providing bulk data download are examples of recommendations covered by this section.