European strategy for data

Open data
1

The European Commission is currently consulting on a European strategy for data. The consultation documents and related URLs are listed below. Submissions close end 31 May 2020.

Six participants from this community made a submission (release 08) under their own names:

Several cosmetic typos fixed in release 08, while release 07 is retained for historical reasons.

As well as providing specific requests (listed below), the submission reviews issues that energy system modelers face in relation to open data and provides some background on allied developments within our community.

Specific requests

The current legal regime must be both clarified and made more supportive of open data:

  • determination on whether human authorship is a necessary condition for copyright

  • determination on whether the machine processing of a legitimately held copy of a collection of atomic data under copyright constitutes infringement

  • improve legislative support for the dedication of information to the public domain

  • amendments to the 96/9/EC database directive to better reflect the intention of lawmakers regarding thresholds and scope and guidance on what constitutes “substantial investment” and “substantial extraction” and how this information should be transmitted to users

  • open licensing by default for market and system information published under statutory reporting (such information usually intended to mitigate market failure and/or facilitate system security)

  • additionally require the above reporting to be provided in machine‑readable format

  • correct and develop the statutory definition for “reuse” provided in the 2019/1024 open data directive (§2.11) in order to align with legal and common understandings of the term (which is currently and perversely remapped to “use”)

  • either clarify or remove the term “primary owner of the data” from regulation 534/2013 (§2.23) which covers the statutory reporting of electricity market information

  • waive 96/9/EC database protection by default on public sector information

Extend existing statutory requirements to publish privately held data of significant public interest and require such data to be in machine‑readable format.

Designate energy sector information as an 2019/1024 open data directive high‑value dataset category and additionally specify key datasets for that new category.

Central and community data standards have useful and complementary roles to play.

European Commission URLs

Documents

European Commission (19 February 2020). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: a European strategy for data — COM (2020) 66 final. Brussels, Belgium: European Commission.

European Commission (19 February 2020). Factsheet: the European data strategy. Brussels, Belgium: European Commission.

Morrison, Robbie (30 May 2020). Submission on a European strategy for data with an emphasis on energy sector datasets — Release 08. Creative Commons CC‑BY‑4.0 license.