The EU Digital Services Act and the Interoperability of European Public Services Directive have accelerated a trend that was already building: public procurement tenders on TED now routinely specify open data standards—OCDS for procurement, DCAT-AP for data catalogs, GeoDCAT-AP for geospatial data, and ADMS-AP for asset management.
Why this matters for integrators. If your system produces data in a proprietary format, every integration with a government system requires a custom adapter. If your system produces data in OCDS, it integrates directly with e-procurement platforms across all EU member states. The difference is not just technical—it is commercial. OCDS-compliant systems are faster to deploy, easier to evaluate, and require less custom development in the procurement process.
The integration advantage. Open standards create network effects. The more systems that speak the same format, the cheaper each integration becomes. A data catalog published in DCAT-AP can be discovered by any EU data portal. A procurement process published in OCDS can be analyzed by any monitoring organization. This is not altruism—it is infrastructure. Standards-compliant data is infrastructure-grade data.
From compliance to strategy. Most organizations approach standards compliance as a cost center: implement the minimum required format, pass the tender evaluation, and revert to proprietary formats for internal use. This misses the strategic opportunity. Organizations that adopt open standards for internal data management—their own catalogs, their own procurement processes—find that the cost of external compliance approaches zero because their systems already speak the standard format natively.
The SAM.gov parallel. In the US, the Federal Data Strategy and OMB memoranda on data standards are driving a similar convergence. SAM.gov registrations increasingly reference data format requirements. The principle is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: open standards reduce integration friction, and reduced friction reduces both procurement cost and deployment risk.
For organizations positioned at the intersection of EU and US public-sector markets, open data standards are not just a compliance requirement—they are a competitive moat.