About
About eupublicdata
eupublicdata is an independent, single-author civic project. It exists to make official European public data legible at a glance, without editorialising it. The work covers EU legislation (EUR-Lex), public tenders (TED), funded research (CORDIS), cohesion projects (Kohesio), funding calls (Funding & Tenders Portal) and the Joint Transparency Register, with country-level breakdowns of migration, asylum and labour indicators from Eurostat and IOM.
The site is run by an Italian VAT-registered freelancer based in Carpi (MO). It receives no funding from political parties, advocacy groups, foundations or media organisations. The infrastructure cost (domain, hosting, database tier) is covered personally. Revenue comes from optional Premium subscriptions and from Google AdSense display advertising on free pages. Editorial decisions are independent of both revenue channels and are detailed in the team page.
Why this project exists
The European Union publishes more open data than any comparable jurisdiction in the world. The PSI Directive of 2003, recast as the Open Data Directive in 2019, established that public-sector information must be available in machine-readable format, free of charge, with the right to reuse for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. The Data Governance Act of 2022 went further on data spaces and intermediary services. Twenty years of legislation have produced a remarkable infrastructure: every regulation in force is on EUR-Lex, every public tender above thresholds is on TED, every euro of cohesion funding is on Kohesio, every lobbyist who meets a Commissioner is on the Transparency Register.
And yet none of that is legible to an ordinary reader. The portals were designed by lawyers and statisticians for lawyers and statisticians. CELEX numbers, NUTS codes, CPV nomenclatures, framework programme acronyms, structural fund objectives, registration categories: a vocabulary that protects the data from being misread, and at the same time hides it from anyone who is not part of the trade. A small business owner who wants to bid on a public contract, a journalist tracing a lobbyist's influence on a regulation, a researcher comparing how different member states absorb cohesion funds: each of them spends a working day learning the vocabulary before they can ask the first question. eupublicdata.eu compresses that working day into a single English-language interface.
What this project is
- A visualisation layer over already-public, already-official data. Every record is a window into a primary source, never a substitute for it.
- An attempt to make that data citable from any side of the political spectrum. The numbers are the same numbers Eurostat or the Commission would give you, just rendered in English and cross-linked.
- Methodologically explicit. Every chart and every detail page links back to its primary source. The methodology page documents how each dataset is fetched, how often it is refreshed, what is deduplicated, what is enriched and how AI assistance is disclosed.
- Open-source-friendly in spirit. The data is upstream, citation is encouraged, the editorial layer is documented. Bug reports and corrections from readers are visible feedback that feeds future releases.
What this project is not
- Editorial in the journalistic sense. We do not write commentary on the figures. We plot them and link them. Where we summarise (the description_enriched field on top-traffic records), the summary is marked as such and the methodology page describes how it is produced.
- Investigative. We do not break news. We aggregate official statistics and make them browsable.
- Affiliated with EU institutions. We are an independent third party, using their datasets under the licences they themselves chose to attach.
- A lobbying or advocacy platform. We do not take positions on policies, parties or candidates. If a reader wants to argue for or against a regulation, they will find on this site the data needed to build that argument from primary sources, never our argument for them.
How we measure success
Three signals tell us the project is working. The first is whether a reader who lands on a detail page can answer their question without clicking through to the upstream portal. The second is whether journalists, researchers and citizens cite the site in their own work (with link-back). The third is whether the corrections we receive from readers shrink over time, which would indicate that the data quality converges with the upstream sources rather than diverging from them.
We do not measure success in pageviews, session duration or any of the vanity metrics that media businesses obsess over. The site is built so that the average visit is short: arrive from a search engine, get the answer, leave with a citable primary source. If you spend ten minutes on a page it is because you found a topic interesting, not because we stretched the content artificially.
Contact
For data corrections, source suggestions, partnership enquiries or takedown requests under GDPR Article 17:
corrections@eupublicdata.eu — dedicated channel for data errors, response within seven working days.
See also: team · methodology · sources · transparency · press.