ePSINet is an Accompanying Measure funded under the EU e-Content programme, building on the work of the PSINet Preparatory Action, over 30 months from August 2002. ePSINet is setting out to help create the conditions for effective implementation of the proposed European Parliament and Council Directive on the re-use and commercial exploitation of public sector documents, COM (2002) 207.

ePSINet aims to help the adoption of beneficial regulatory, standards, and information management frameworks for Public Sector Information by providing structured access for stakeholders in this area to:

• policy and legislation information linked to legal cases;
• good practice in clear but dynamic mandating of public sector management and dissemination of PSI;
• innovation and good practice in the management of PSI over the whole information lifecycle, covering back office, workflow, content and records management, preservation, search technologies, multilingual applications and delivery channels such as web portals, Digital TV, mobile devices and kiosks;
• developments in the related standards, especially those needed to ensure wide, cross-domain interoperability including those related to data formats, metadata, identifiers, terminologies, preservation, rights management, multilingual applications and the emerging standards for the semantic web.

ePSINet seeks to create a more cohesive Europe-wide PSI network and to develop knowledge-sharing relationships with and between sectoral organizations, whilst building international cooperation with the USA and elsewhere to promote global market potential for European PSI content. A network of country co-ordinators and support groups is being created to enable this.

Through its ePSIGate web portal, ePSINet will provide a knowledge-sharing, alerting, and advisory service targeted to the needs of all stakeholders in PSI, including public administrators, commercial re-users and end-user representatives.

The work of ePSINet will culminate with a major policy conference to set the scene for future progress in the implementation of the Directive and the use of PSI.