The necessity of data allocation: A plea for a private law (property law) perspective

Clarifying the legal status of data is one of the major issues and challenges the European legislator has to deal and cope with while establishing a legal frame for a European data economy. Albeit at the beginning of the policy-making process the idea of creating a data right (on non-personal data) was on the agenda of the European Commission, this idea now seems to be have been abandoned. Instead, the focus actually lies on the creation of access and management regimes (e.g. Open Data Directive, Proposal for a European Data Governance Act). This approach seems, from a private law perspective, questionable, since the access right is inherently connected to – or more precisely, flowing from – an allocative right (in its most classical form: ownership). This article is a plea for a private law, or more precisely, property law perspective, namely for the creation of an allocative data right. It explores why the access approach from a private law perspective appears to be inconsistent and outlines the contours of such allocative right. In this context, contemporary property law theories are also assessed, since it is primarily property law which shall serve as the doctrinal background and framework for the envisaged allocative data right.

Do the European Data Portal Datasets in the Categories Government and Public Sector, Transport, and Education, Culture and Sport Meet the Data on the Web Best Practices?

(1) Background: The European Data Portal is one of the worldwide initiatives that aggregates and make open data available. (2) Methods: This is a case study with a qualitative approach that aims to determine to what extent the datasets from the Government and Public Sector, Transport, and Education, Culture and Sport categories published on the portal meet the Data on the Web Best Practices (W3C). With the datasets sorted by last modified and filtered by the ratings Excellent and Good+, we analyzed 50 different datasets from each category. (3) Results: The analysis revealed that the Government and Transport categories have the best-rated datasets, followed by Transportation and, lastly, Education. (4) Conclusions: This analysis revealed that the Government and Transport categories have the best-rated datasets and Education the least. The most observed BPs were: BP1, BP2, BP4, BP5, BP10, BP11, BP12, BP13C, BP16, BP17, BP19, BP29, and BP34, while the least observed were: BP3, BP7H, BP7C, BP13H, BP14, BP15, BP21, BP32, and BP35. These results fill a gap in the literature on the quality of the data made available by this portal and provide insights for European data managers on which best practices are most observed and which ones need more attention.