Data

In EU composite procedures, Open Data can serve many public interests in a new way, leading to faster and more accurate decision-making enabling truly ‘effective’ administrative action. The governance of interoperable public data across EU and member States, including Open Data, is one of the ongoing challenges in a digital world where administrations as platforms compete with each other, while Artificial Intelligence and the so-called space economy open up new frontiers for public law.

In its European Strategy for Data, the Commission presents its ideas on how the EU can create a «single European data space». The plan is to make the EU a leader in a data-driven society. By creating a single market for data, it will allow it to flow freely within the EU and across sectors for the benefit of businesses, researchers, and public administrations. One central factor in the European data space is putting in place clear and trustworthy data governance mechanisms. Focusing on publicly held data, the administrative structures in the Open Data Directive, the Data Governance Act (DGA), and the first sectoral data space proposed, the European Health Data Space (EHDS), are analyzed. The question posed in the article is whether the administrative structure that has been developed in the EU for the last decades, the European composite administration, is well placed to fulfil the ideal of clear and trustworthy data governance.