Introduction, context, historical perspective
The re-use of public sector information has long been considered an important topic at EU level. The idea behind the creation a European framework in this area is to impose on public sector bodies a set of harmonised rules to allow the re-use by third parties of the information held by these organisations, for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
Given the considerable socio-economic potential of this data, the aim is to maximise its openness, sharing and re-use.
While the EU had already undertaken some legislative initiatives in this direction, such as Directive 2003/98/EC to encourage and promote the re-use of public sector information and Directive (EU) 2019/1024 on open data and the re-use of public sector information, the expected potential did not materialise due to several obstacles. These barriers include low trust in data sharing, problems with re-using public sector data and collecting data for the common good, as well as technical barriers.
