EU Commission unwraps public beta of open data portal with 5800+ datasets, ahead of Jan 2013 launch - The Next Web

"Good news for open data lovers in the European Union and beyond: the European Commission on Christmas Eve quietly pushed live the public beta version of its all-new open data portal... This could include geographical data, statistics, meteorological data, data from publicly funded research projects, and digitised books from libraries... From the newly launched website: 'This portal is about transparency, open government and innovation. The European Commission Data Portal provides access to open public data from the European Commission. It also provides access to data of other Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies at their request. The published data can be downloaded by everyone interested to facilitate reuse, linking and the creation of innovative services. Moreover, this Data Portal promotes and builds literacy around Europe’s data.'   Already, some individual EU member states have undertaken initiatives to open as much data to the public as possible: see Data.gov.uk, Data.gov.be and Data.gouv.fr as examples. The European Commissions wants to work with member states to build a larger data repository on top of this.  It’s also worth noting the existence of open culture data portal Europeana, which enables people to explore the digital resources of Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections... The portal is the result of the Commission’s ‘Open Data Strategy for Europe’, which wasannounced in December last year and is expected to deliver a 40 billion euro boost to the EU’s economy annually... At launch, the portal boasts 5,811 datasets, the lion share (5,634) of which understandably comes from Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU.  The beta portal has a SPARQL endpoint to provide linked data, and will also point toapplications that use the data made available.  If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you should also definitely check out the Open Data Institute ..."