Introduction and definition

The current emergence of open data portals in the government context is opening great opportunities for collaborative government, but it is happening in a scattered way leading to sub-optimal data reuse and impact. Open data publication needs to meet requirements for timely publication but at the same time to ensure sufficient data quality. At a more advanced level, publication of linked data requires significant effort and has encountered unequal success, but the benefits are high in terms of data interoperability and deriving reuse and data quality. Linked data refers to a set of best practices for exposing, sharing, and connecting structured pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Web. Simplifying and lowering costs of open data publication is indeed a key area of research.

Curating tools (selecting, aggregating and presenting) and on-the-fly data quality agreements will reduce the cost and time of data quality assurance. Finer grained data privacy solutions will also contribute to increase the amount of public data being published, as well as enable real-time publication of data.

Why it matters in governance

Data openness has resulted in some application in the commercial field, but by far the most relevant applications are created in the context of government data repositories. With regard to linked data in particular, most research is being undertaken in other application domains such as medicine. Government starts to play a leading role towards a web of data. However, current research in the field of open linked data for government is limited.

Recent trends

Current emerging practice focuses on the publication of open government data in machine-readable format, possibly through open standards. More innovative implementation includes publication of linked data but little research is carried out in the governance context. Other lighter-weight forms of interoperability focus on RESTful interfaces. Furthermore, because of privacy concerns, the only data provided are aggregated and anonymised.

Existing research focuses mainly on publishing tools for linked data, converting data in RDF, linking RDF data sources and creating semantic vocabularies for linked data.

Current practice

1. Data.gov repositories
2. Linked data in data.gov repositories
3. Machine-readable formats
4. RESTful interfaces

Advantages of Application in Policy Making

The openness in government data is important for the following reasons:

1. Promotion of transparency concerning the destination and use of public expenditure
2. Improvement in the quality of policy making, which becomes more evidence based
3. Display the full economic and social impact of information, create services based on government data
4. Increase in the collaboration across government bodies, as well as between government and citizens
5. Permits new added-values services to come into existence
6. Increase the awareness of citizens on specific issues, as well as their information about government policies
7. Promote accountability of public officials

Inspiring cases

Very important examples are given within the scope of the Open Government Initiative2 carried out by the Obama Administration for promoting government transparency on a global scale:

1. Data.gov3: platform which increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. In the scope of Data.gov US and India have developed an open source version called the Open Government Platform4 (OGPL), which can be downloaded and evaluated by any national Government or state or local entity as a path toward making their data open and transparent
2. USAspending.gov5: it is a searchable website displaying for each Federal award the name of the entity receiving the award, the amount of the award, information on the award, and the location of the entity receiving the award
3. FederalRegister.gov6: HTML edition of the Federal Register to make it easier for citizens and communities to understand and get informed about the regulatory process
4. Recovery.gov7: website aimed at showing the American public how Recovery funds are being spent by recipients of contracts, grants, and loans, and the distribution of Recovery entitlements and tax benefits
5. Performance.gov8: website providing a window of US Government Administration effort to improve performance and accountability, in order to create a government that is more effective, efficient, innovative, and responsive
6. IT Dashboard9: website enabling federal agencies, industry, the general public and other stakeholders to view details of federal information technology investments
7. Reginfo.gov10: website displaying information about regulations under development in order to ensure public availability of regulatory information, effective regulatory planning, Sound economic and scientific data for regulatory action

At the European level we have the repository of applications making use of open data: publicdata.eu11

At the European national level the initiatives include:

1. United Kingdom: Data.gov.uk12, which collects data from 5,400 datasets available, from all central government departments and a number of other public sector bodies and local authorities. Another interesting case is “Where Does My Money Go?”13 which shows how daily taxes are allocated among the different functions of the government.
2. Italy: Dati.gov.it14, which is an open data portal allowing citizens, developers, firms and public administrations to make use of the public administration information stock
3. Denmark: DigitalisĂŠrDK15, a formal central repository of information on data interchange standards established and maintained by the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency
4. France: data.gouv.fr16 . Moreover we have the meta data portal of the APIE17 (Agence du Patrimoine ImmatĂŠriel de l’Etat), responsible for open data policy making and selling
5. Spain: datos.gob.es18, the national portal for managing and organizing the Catalogue of Public Information of the General State Administration
6. Ireland: StatCentral.ie19, providing standard documentation on recurring official statistics and links to where they can be found
7. Netherlands: Overheid.nl20, the central access point to all information about government organisations of the Netherlands
8. Norway: data.norge.no21 national portal containing a data catalogue and a platform to discuss OGD questions
9. Sweden: Opengov.se22, an initiative to highlight available public datasets in Sweden containing a commentable catalogue of government datasets, their formats and usage restrictions

At European regional level we have:

1. Spain: regional data portals in the Asturias23, Basque Country24 and Catalonia25
2. Italy: data portal of the Regione Piemonte26
3. France: data portal of the Rennes metropolitan region27

Some other open data initiatives are present in countries such as Saudi Arabia28, Australia29, Canada30, South Korea31, Estonia32, Hong Kong33, Kenya34, Moldova35, Morocco36, Mexico37, New Zealand38, Peru39, Singapore40, Tunisia41, Portugal42, Brazil43, Chile44, Uruguay45, Russia46.

Key challenges and gaps

1. Language barriers preventing from finding datasets on the websites of public bodies from different countries
2. Obsolete systems still in use delay the process of opening
3. Unclear or ambiguous licensing of government data
4. Difficult dialogue between the public institution which produces data and the final user
5. Some material not downloadable in bulk but available only via a web interface
6. Difficulty in aggregating/comparing data from different public bodies sources
7. Insufficient reuse data skills from the users’ side
8. Many data catalogues do not have any mechanism to capture value added to the datasets (or metadata about datasets) by users, or the metadata provided are insufficient
9. Link and combine a large number of datasets from a large number of different sources
10. Limitations in the data formats which are accepted
11. Privacy concerns

Current research

1. Government data
2. Catalogues vocabularies
3. Open data interoperability
4. Capturing and publishing linked data
5. Curating tools for data quality

Disciplines of research: technological research: semantics, interoperability, privacy-enhancing-technologies

Possible research instruments: Testbeds and living labs, STREPs

Future research: long term and short term issues

Short-term research

1. On-the-fly data quality agreements
2. Easy and privacy-compliant data publication tools
3. Open dataset integration and quality check

Long-term research

1. Web of data
2. Privacy-by-design compliancy in open data
3. Real-time publication of linked data