A portal to share open data between public sector bodies in Europe has gone live.

The European Union Open Data Portal project, which started in 2012, has been gathering and aligning data from 34 European countries.

The portal includes more than 240,000 datasets from 34 European countries, divided into 13 categories including agriculture, transport, science, justice, and health.

In a blog post about the launch, Wendy Carrara, principal consultant at Capgemini Consulting, who has been working on the project, said: “Have you ever tried to find open data from another country whose language you do not speak? Or have you tried to see whether data from one country exist also in a similar way in another?

“The European Data Portal that we just launched can help you.”

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According to a study carried out by the European Data Portal team, the market size of open data is expected to increase by 36.9% to EUR75.7bn by 2020.

This included benefits from improved performance of public sector, private sector growth and wider social welfare.

The team running the project also hopes that the portal will encourage government to publish more data and introduce targeted actions to reuse it.

Carrara said: “By taking a look at the data released by other countries and made available on the European Data Portal, governments can also be inspired to publish new data sets they had not though about in the first place.”

The portal includes a multilingual search function, along with a licensing “assistant” to help users understand what licenses have been attached to which data set.

It is part of work by the European Union to create a Digital Single Market and was launched at the European Data Forum in Luxembourg.