France today launched a national data portal. This data portal had been announced in February 2011 with the creation of EtaLab , the group tasked with realizing the data portal.

At launch the portal contains some 350.000 data sets from 90 public sector bodies. French civic organisation Regards Citoyens had a sneak preview of the portal in the past days, and did a quick analysis of some 500 data sets, regarding the file formats, previous on-line availability of the data, and which public sector bodies are contributing the data. In general, after this great start, there seems to be room for improvement specifically in making data available in non-proprietary formats, i.e. open standards.

With this launch France is welcomed to a growing group of national data portal initiatives in the EU.