On January 20, 2023, the European Commission published Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 of December 21, 2022, establishing a list of special high-value data sets and the modalities of their publication and re-use. This Implementing Regulation contains a list of high-value data sets that public authorities will have to make available for re-use free of charge within 16 months.
The mentioned list also includes a large number of data sets that are part of INSPIRE themes, that is, certain INSPIRE data sets are also high-value data sets. Thus, out of a total of 34 INSPIRE themes of spatial data sets, at least 24 of them belong to high-value data sets. Thereby, the definitions established for data sets in the categories of geospatial data, Earth observation and environment data, meteorological data and mobility from the INSPIRE directive are applied.
For subjects whose data sets belong to high-value data sets and are already part of NSDI/INSPIRE this practically means that the first steps have been taken in fulfilling the conditions prescribed by Commission Implementing Regulation 2023/138 and Directive 2019/1024. Describing metadata, developing download services, which are considered APIs in the context of the aforementioned legislation, and describing the data structure through specifications has already been done. For such data sets, it is still necessary to clearly define the terms of use through an open license, and to indicate through metadata that these are high-value sets.
Datasets covered by this list must be available in machine-readable format, via APIs and, where relevant, as bulk downloads. The license under which the datasets are made available is the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license or any equivalent or less restrictive license.
The Implementing Regulation was adopted in accordance with the Open Data Directive, which defines six categories of such high-value datasets:
- geospatial,
- Earth observation and the environment,
- meteorological,
- statistics,
- companies and company ownership and
- mobility.
This list supplements Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of June 20, 2019 on open data and re-use of public sector information. Directive 2019/1024 regulates the re-use of existing documents in the possession of public sector bodies and public enterprises of the member states of the European Union, among other documents to which the INSPIRE directive applies.
More information is available at the following link.