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Open Data Exposed

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Open Data Exposed

Part of the book series: Information Technology and Law Series ((ITLS,volume 30))

Abstract

This book is about open data, i.e. data that does not have any barriers in the (re)use. Open data aims to optimize access, sharing and using data from a technical, legal, financial, and intellectual perspective. Data increasingly determines the way people live their lives today. Nowadays, we cannot imagine a life without real-time traffic information about our route to work, information of the daily news or information about the local weather. At the same time, citizens themselves now are constantly generating and sharing data and information via many different devices and social media systems. Especially for governments, collection, management, exchange, and use of data and information have always been key tasks, since data is both the primary input to and output of government activities. Also for businesses, non-profit organizations, researchers and various other actors, data and information are essential.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    IBM 2016; SINTEF 2013.

  2. 2.

    Jacobson 2013.

  3. 3.

    A Zettabyte equals 1 billion Terabytes. A Terabyte equals 1000 Gigabytes.

  4. 4.

    Karr 2012; see also DOMO 2017.

  5. 5.

    Janssen 2011.

  6. 6.

    Mulcahy 2017.

  7. 7.

    See Montargil and Santos 2017.

  8. 8.

    See Kelly 2012.

  9. 9.

    See also Castells and Himanen 2002.

  10. 10.

    See Chignard 2013: The term open data appeared for the first time in 1995, in a document from an American scientific agency (see National Research Council 1995).

  11. 11.

    See for the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles of open science: Wilkinson et al. 2016.

  12. 12.

    ‘Open Definition 2.1’. http://opendefinition.org/. Accessed May 2018.

  13. 13.

    ‘Open Definition 2.1’. http://opendefinition.org/. Accessed May 2018. Please note that the attribution and sharealike requirements are possible limitations in the use, therefore not strictly adhering to the ‘without any barrier’ requirement of open data (see further Chap. 6 of this book).

  14. 14.

    As pointed out by the principles’ authors, “(t)here are many definitions of “open” and this is but one. The 2007 working group’s definition sits at the unique intersection of open government and open data and has United States sensibilities”—Dietrich et al. 2007.

  15. 15.

    Open data must be the default setting for governmental data releases, provided that said data is of a public nature, meaning that it must not be subject to valid privacy, security or other legitimate and legally sanctioned limitations. Moreover, while some resources are by now digital by default, some other artefacts are not: in the latter case, they should be made digitally available to the maximum extent possible.

  16. 16.

    I.e. collected at its very source, and as granular as possible; entities obtaining the original dataset, processing it, and publishing it in a modified (e.g. aggregated) form, should have the obligation to publish the original data set in its default format, thus contributing in preserving it for posterity.

  17. 17.

    Each piece of information has its own lifecycle, and the accuracy—and therefore the utility—of a dataset partly depends on the time lapsed from the dataset’s creation. Timeliness, therefore, means that government data should be released as early as possible, to preserve the data’s value.

  18. 18.

    Data must be accessible to the widest possible number of users for the widest possible array of purposes. Accessibility is deemed to be lacking if the data is not accessible through automated means, due to technological, policy, or other kinds of restrictions.

  19. 19.

    As following from the accessibility principle above, data must be machine-readable and processable, and thus in a widely used, normalized and sufficiently documented format.

  20. 20.

    I.e. available to anyone, for any purpose, without access control, ‘walled gardens’, or other gatekeeping activities that might lead to differences in accessing information.

  21. 21.

    No entity should have exclusive control over the data format employed. As several proprietary formats are widely used, and conversely some open formats have a narrow user base, the decision of releasing a dataset in both widely used proprietary formats and in less used but open formats is compliant with the principle in discussion, as long as the only format used is not a proprietary one.

  22. 22.

    I.e. not subject to limitations deriving from IP rights, thus either in the public domain or disciplined by an open license.

  23. 23.

    See Carrara et al. 2016.

  24. 24.

    See Kulk and Van Loenen 2012; Van Loenen et al. 2016.

  25. 25.

    See Welle Donker 2016.

  26. 26.

    Pollock 2011; Harrison et al. 2012; Zuiderwijk et al. 2014; Jetzek 2017; Styin et al. 2017.

  27. 27.

    Nardi and Day 1999.

  28. 28.

    See e.g. Heimstädt et al. 2014; Zuiderwijk et al. 2014; Styrin et al. 2017.

  29. 29.

    Pollock 2011.

  30. 30.

    See also Jetzek 2017: Stressing that the open data ecosystem should be circular in nature.

  31. 31.

    Pollock 2011.

  32. 32.

    Ubaldi (2013) argues that the open data ecosystem consists of three interacting ecosystems: the data provider ecosystem, the data user ecosystem and the infomediary ecosystem.

  33. 33.

    See, for example, Ubaldi 2013; Dawes et al. 2016; Harrison et al. 2012.

  34. 34.

    Zuiderwijk et al. 2014.

  35. 35.

    Share PSI 2.0 Best Practice: Establish an Open Data Ecosystem, 25 July 2016 [on line] available at: https://www.w3.org/2013/share-psi/bp/eode/. Accessed May 2018.

  36. 36.

    See also Dawes et al. 2016; Ubaldi 2013; Harrison et al. 2012.

  37. 37.

    Such ecosystem may exist at different levels of scale: within an organisation, a country, region or the worldwide open data ecosystem, in a specific domain (see Zuiderwijk 2015). Open data ecosystems may also involve multiple levels, namely a data producer and a data user level, with between the infomediaries level connecting the two (Ubaldi 2013; Jetzek 2017).

  38. 38.

    Cf. Harrison et al. 2012.

  39. 39.

    Harrison et al. 2012.

  40. 40.

    Boley and Chang 2007; Harrison et al. 2012.

  41. 41.

    Davies 2010; cf. the concepts of infrastructures and business systems in Chan et al. 2001.

  42. 42.

    Zuiderwijk 2015.

  43. 43.

    Zuiderwijk 2015.

  44. 44.

    Janssen et al. 2012.

  45. 45.

    Borgman 2000, p. 30.

  46. 46.

    Coleman and McLaughlin 1997.

  47. 47.

    Coleman and McLaughlin 1997.

  48. 48.

    Star and Ruhleder 1996, p. 113.

  49. 49.

    Zuiderwijk et al. 2014.

  50. 50.

    Zuiderwijk et al. 2014; Ubaldi 2013.

  51. 51.

    Ubaldi 2013; Harrison et al. 2012; World Bank 2015.

  52. 52.

    Harrison et al. 2012.

  53. 53.

    See also World Bank 2015; Williamson et al. 2003.

  54. 54.

    Davies 2010.

  55. 55.

    See also O’Reilly 2010: Arguing that greater government involvement could increase the vitality of an infrastructure. “But if the lesson is correctly learned, it should do so not by competing with the private sector to deliver [..] services, but by investing in infrastructure (and “rules of the road”) that will lead to a more robust private sector ecosystem.”

  56. 56.

    European Commission DG CONNECT A European strategy on the data value chain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Knowledge Centre Open Data, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Bastiaan van Loenen, Glenn Vancauwenberghe & Lorenzo Dalla Corte

  2. Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Joep Crompvoets

  3. Tilburg University (TILT), Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Lorenzo Dalla Corte

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  1. Bastiaan van Loenen
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  2. Glenn Vancauwenberghe
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  3. Joep Crompvoets
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  4. Lorenzo Dalla Corte
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Correspondence to Bastiaan van Loenen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Bastiaan van Loenen

  2. Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Glenn Vancauwenberghe

  3. Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Joep Crompvoets

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van Loenen, B., Vancauwenberghe, G., Crompvoets, J., Dalla Corte, L. (2018). Open Data Exposed. In: van Loenen, B., Vancauwenberghe, G., Crompvoets, J. (eds) Open Data Exposed. Information Technology and Law Series, vol 30. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-261-3_1

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