The Digital Agenda Scoreboard : An Statistical Anatomy of Europe ’ s way into the Information Age

Evidence-based policy is policy informed by rigorously established objective evidence. An important aspect of evidence-based policy is the use of scientifically rigorous studies to identify programs and practices capable of improving policy relevant outcomes. Statistics represent a crucial means to determine whether progress is made towards policy targets. In May 2010, the European Commission adopted the Digital Agenda for Europe, a strategy to take advantage of the potential offered by the rapid progress of digital technologies. The Digital Agenda contains commitments to undertake a number of specific policy actions intended to stimulate a circle of investment in and usage of digital technologies. It identifies 13 key performance targets. In order to chart the progress of both the announced policy actions and the key performance targets a scoreboard is published, thus allowing the monitoring and benchmarking of the main developments of information society in European countries. In addition to these human-readable browsing, visualization and exploration methods, machine-readable access facilitating re-usage and interlinking of the underlying data is provided by means of RDF and Linked Open Data. We sketch the transformation process from raw data up to rich, interlinked RDF, describe its publishing and the lessons learned.