1. EU-US Open Data project
NTTS Conference
March 14th 2017

2. Genesis of the project
In July 2016, the US Department of Commerce contacted the European Commission (DG CONNECT and ESTAT) to propose a joint open data project
Objective: creation of an R library giving common access to comparable Eurostat and BEA regional economic datasets (BEA = Bureau of Economic Analysis)

3. Timeline of the project
August – September 2016: identification of comparable datasets. These include GDP, employment by industry, disposable income and population at various regional levels (NUTS 2/NUTS 3/Metropolitan regions)
September – October 2016: development of the library
November 2016: alpha release of library

4. Our Vision: users can pull cohesive economic datasets from the EU and the US using a single coding function
What are we doing to achieve this:
We identified a set of economic datasets with a sufficiently high degree of comparability. We chose to concentrate on economic data on regions and metropolitan areas, available from the BEA and Eurostat
We will the express the relationship and integration logic between these datasets in an Linked Open Metadata Store
Finally, we will develop an R library which will pull the data from our respective APIs and use the information in the metadata store to provide an integrated view of the data.

5. - The integration logic will be encoded as Linked Open Metadata
- It will use well-known RDF ontologies for the description of datasets (e.g. the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary) and encode the ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) required to harmonise our data
- The Metadata Store will be made available to the public. Users may choose to use it and extend it to cover other use cases or to encode different mappings between BEA and Eurostat datasets.

6. Library currently available on GitHub, eventually also on CRAN
R library
Library currently available on GitHub, eventually also on CRAN

7. Current status
Alpha version of the R library was unveiled at Lisbon Web Summit on November 8th. It is available on GitHub:
The GitHub page includes a short tutorial. A short video tutorial is also available here.

8. Benefits of the project
Easing access to detailed and comparable data on EU and US economies
Gained hands-on experience in using Linked Open Data to enhance the interoperability of our statistics
Showed that EU and US can cooperate on fast-developing, innovative projects

9. Next steps? Possible avenues for further work:
Collecting feedback from users of open data on how to further facilitate access to EU and US datasets
Consolidation of the library routines and of the underlying infrastructure
Extension of the approach to other datasets or to similar use cases

10. Thank you for your attention Any questions?