[3] The inter-ministerial Task Force "Etalab [fr]", under the authority of the Prime Minister, is in charge of creating and updating the portal for public Open Data data.gouv.fr, which has been made available since December 5, 2011 and hosts more than 19,000 datasets.
The role of Chief Data Officer in the French public administration was created by decree of September 16, 2014.
He/she shall hand in to the Prime Minister a yearly report on the inventory, the governance, the production, the dissemination and the use of data by administrations.
Are constitutive of such documents files, reports, studies, minutes of meetings and proceedings, statistics, directives, instructions, circulars, notes and ministerial responses, correspondence, notices, previsions and decisions.
[6] In 2003, directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 November 2003 details the conditions for use of public sector information.
It is transposed into French law in 2005,[7][8] so as to facilitate the use of existing documents or data held by public organizations.
[14][15][16] Under French law, public data is likely to contain sensitive information, either because it allows the identification of a person, or because it is subject to copyright, State secret or considerations of national defense.
This licence created by ETALAB, the French Prime Minister's task force for Public Data[17] is meant to be used widely in France.