Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Communities, continues to release as open source its ICT solutions. To date, Eurostat has shared 102 solutions on the European Commission’s Joinup platform.
The statistical office has been using and sharing open source for more than a decade. Already in 2004 Eurostat’s ICT policy stipulated to consider open source software for all new projects.
Eurostat has been making its solutions and data publicly available as open source for years. Examples include the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange. The SDMX Converter lets users convert statistical time series (GESMES) to formats such as dataset publishing language messages (DSPL) and comma-separated values (CSV). The agency also shares many code lists, including a list of currencies, keywords for accidents and terms used to describe agricultural area and arable land area.
The organisation also engages open source developers. In 2010 it was closely involved in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s international Eurostat hackathon. Its datasets are often source material used in similar gatherings of software developers and open data enthusiasts.
Even the website
Even the Eurostat website runs open source. Renewed in December 2014, the website of the statistical office now runs on Liferay, an open source enterprise content management and collaboration system, superseding a proprietary portal solution.
More information:
OSOR news item
OSOR news item
A 2004 paper on open source at Eurostat (PDF)