data.europa.eu

data.europa.eu is the official European Data Portal, a single point of access to open data from 36 European countries and the EU institutions. The important thing to grasp is that it is a catalogue, not a warehouse: it holds rich descriptions of over 1.6 million datasets and links out to wherever each one actually lives, whether that is a national portal, a regional body, or an EU agency. So you use it to discover and locate data, then follow the link to fetch the files themselves.

Coverage is genuinely wide, spanning economics, transport, health, the environment, agriculture, energy, and more, across dozens of countries and languages. The catalogue records come in CSV, JSON, and XML, and the whole thing is also published as linked data (RDF), a way of describing facts as connected statements that machines can follow. There is a SPARQL endpoint and a search API over the metadata, so you can programmatically find every dataset matching a theme, country, or format before you download anything.

For a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system that needs to answer questions across European countries, this portal saves you from hunting through dozens of national sites and reconciling their conventions. A sensible pattern is to retrieve over the metadata first (titles, descriptions, publishers, themes) to help users and your model find the right dataset, then ingest the specific tables that matter for your domain.

Two caveats to plan for. Because it federates so many publishers, quality and freshness vary, and some links will be stale or point to large raw files that need real transformation before they are useful. On licensing, most datasets are CC BY 4.0, so commercial reuse is fine with attribution, but terms differ per dataset and per source, so confirm the licence on each one you actually use. For UK-specific data, pair it with data.gov.uk; for the EU institutions' own outputs, this is the most complete front door.