Data Catalogue

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is the European Commission's in-house science service which employs scientists to carry out research in order to provide independent scientific advice and support to policies of the European Union.

A dedicated JRC Data Policy was prepared to complement the JRC Policy on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Supporting Guidance, and to promote open access to research data in the context of Horizon 2020. Important policy commitments and the relevant regulatory basis within the European Union and the European Commission include the following documents:

In this catalogue, you can find an inventory of data produced by the JRC in accordance with the JRC Data Policy. The content is continuously updated and shall not be seen as a complete inventory of JRC data. Currently, the inventory describes only a small subset of JRC data.

The catalogue organises its content in dataset collections. A dataset collection is a set of metadata records about datasets that are related to each other according to some criterion.

For Developers

One way to access the data is to use the REST API. Most of the portal core functionalities are available through the application programming interface (API), which encompasses most of what you can do with the web interface. The information retrieved can then be used by an external code to transform, update or reference and provide new input for further calls to the API.

The following API are currently available:

  1. CKAN action API, RPC-style API that exposes some legacy features to existing API clients.
  2. ODCAT action API, RPC-style API that we recommend to use by new API clients.

You can teach your application to communicate with the catalogue using OpenAPI specification  .

Additionally, metadata can be retrieved in RDF or JSON formats directly from a collection or a dataset page by adding accordingly .rdf or .rj extension to the page url, for instance https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/collection/emm.rdf  .

RDF data model

The reference standard used for Metadata is DCAT-AP (DCAT application profile for data portals in Europe), that is actually the de facto EU metadata interchange format, extended in order to meet the identified requirements and needs for scientific data.

However, since JRC data are multi-disciplinary, and each discipline uses specific metadata standard, as well as specific controlled vocabularies for annotating metadata records, the JRC Data Catalogue infrastructure is designed to re-use as much as possible existing metadata, without requiring the original records to be re-created based on the reference standard (namely, DCAT-AP).

Read more 
RDF data model
The following diagram depicts the main resources described in the JRC Metadata Schema and their relationships.

Contact Us

For enquiries regarding the JRC Data Catalogue, please contact us via email JRC-DATA-SUPPORT (at) ec.europa.eu. When applicable, place the URL of a dataset or a collection where your question refers to.