Belgium continues the trend set in motion by the open data movement and has launched a portal making government data available to developers and researchers.

The Belgian Federal Public Service has recently launched its open data portal, data.gov.be. The portal offers developers a growing number of data sets to help them build applications for both businesses and citizens and to stimulate the development of e-Government services.

Belgium is not the only country in Europe opening up its data. The United Kingdom has been operating the data.gov.uk initiative since 2009 and the Netherlands as well have an active open government data portal. Others are set to go live soon: data portals in Spain and Portugal are expected to become active this month and the French national portal will be launched in December. The European Commission is also aware of the importance of open data and and will soon begin to work on the implementation of its own open data portal, data.eu. The European Public Sector Information Platform has also hosted several sessions at the recently held Open Government Data Camp.

Despite this clear move towards Open Data, there is however still little discussion on Open Metadata. As more governments are opening up their data, the need to make this information interoperable becomes increasingly important. Opening up data is a significant improvement at the national level, but using metadata will enable the effective use and exchange of government data across borders.

SEMIC.EU encourages and assists Member States in making their data more interoperable by offering a platform to host, develop and share reusable metadata. With an increasing number of open data initiatives, governments should collaborate and agree on the semantics of their data. By doing so, public administrations in Europe will become front-runners in the move towards Open Government Metadata.