Based on this decision, all the EU institutions were invited - and are still today - to publish information such as open data and to make it accessible to the public whenever possible.

Implementation of EU open data policy was the responsibility of the Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) of the European Commission.

The portal enabled users to search, explore, link, download and easily re-use data for commercial or non-commercial purposes, through a common metadata catalogue.

From the portal, users could access data published on the websites of the various institutions, agencies and other bodies of the EU.

The portal contained a very wide variety of high-value open data across EU policy domains, including the economy, employment, science, environment and education.

At the time it was merged into data.europa.eu, around 70 EU institutions, bodies or departments (e.g. Eurostat, the European Environment Agency, the Joint Research Centre and other European Commission Directorates General and EU Agencies) had made datasets available, making a total of over 13,000.

To promote linked open data, the portal makes extensive use of controlled vocabularies, such as EuroVoc.