The importance of PSI Portals!
The European Commission (EC) PSI Group met in Luxembourg on the 25th September to consider PSI Portals and Member State progress with respect to delivering Article 9 of the Public Sector Information (PSI) re-use Directive 2003/98/EC. Article 9 states that:
Member States shall ensure that practical arrangements are in place that facilitate the search for documents available for reuse, such as assets lists, accessible preferably online, of main documents, and portal sites that are linked to decentralized assets lists.
Recital 23 of the Directive states:
(23) Tools that help potential re-users to find documents available for re-use and the conditions for re-use can facilitate considerably the cross-border use of public sector documents. Member States should therefore ensure that practical arrangements are in place that help re-users in their search for documents available for reuse. Assets lists, accessible preferably online, of main documents (documents that are extensively re-used or that have the potential to be extensively re-used), and portal sites that are linked to decentralised assets lists are examples of such practical arrangements.
The Commission introductory paper to the meeting states:
Experience shows that where these practical measures have been well implemented, PSI re-use practice becomes easier for both the public and private sector. This is for example the case in the UK, where OPSI’s website became the 7th most visited public sector website in 2008. PSI portals with, for example, links to data sets and asset lists, clear re-use conditions, electronic licences, reusable information, etc, are important tools to facilitate reuse and cut down red tape. This was confirmed by the participants, both from public and private sector, on the 12th PSI Group meeting.
There are few Web portals in the Member States although they differ in their objectives, as well as in their organizational, technical approaches. Some of them are information only whilst others serve as a “one stop shop” and, in addition to providing basic information and recommendations on PSI re-use, they also offer electronic licencing, links to downloadable PSI or asset lists, etc (e.g. the UK OPSI and the Spanish Aporta websites). In the 12th PSI Group meeting some Member States, such as France, announced that they intend to set up a portal in the near future. At European level, in addition to the EC PSI portal, the Commission is funding the PSI platform, a one stop shop for PSI information across Europe. Other initiatives also exist in third countries, such as the recent portal launched by the Obama administration (data.gov) or the data catalogue initiative of the District of Columbia (http://data.octo.dc.gov ), a project which has been running for some time already.
The Commission believes that PSI portals are crucial in promoting and enabling PSI re-use in the Member States. The purpose of this meeting is to highlight the importance of PSI portals and exchange good practices and ideas building on the good work carried out by several Member States,
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