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Tell Me How My Open Data Is Re-used: Increasing Transparency Through the Open City Toolkit

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Open Cities | Open Data

Abstract

The Open Data movement has been gaining momentum in recent years, with increasingly many public institutions making their data freely accessible. Despite much data being already open (and more to come), finding information about the actual usage of these open datasets is still a challenge. This chapter introduces two tools of the Open City Toolkit (OCT) that tackle this issue: a tool to increase transparency and interactive guidelines. Interviews with city council employees confirmed the utility of the transparency tool. Both tools can be used by city councils (for planning purposes) and by users interested to know more about the value of current open datasets (for information purposes).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://opendatainception.io/ (last accessed: May 19, 2018).

  2. 2.

    https://www.data.gov/ (last accessed: May 15, 2018).

  3. 3.

    http://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/home (last accessed: May 15, 2018).

  4. 4.

    http://data.gov.au/ (last accessed: May 15, 2018).

  5. 5.

    http://opendefinition.org/ (last accessed: May 15, 2018).

  6. 6.

    http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-2.7.3/maintaining/tracking.html (last accessed: May 15, 2018).

  7. 7.

    The ideal number of participants for interviews is purpose-dependent (see, e.g., Guest, Bunce, & Johnson, 2006), but a common range is between 8 and 15 participants (Lopez & Whitehead, 2013). When doing qualitative research, “the ‘richness’ of data collected is far more important than the number of participants” (Lopez & Whitehead, 2013).

  8. 8.

    See, Fusch and Ness (2015) for a brief introduction to data saturation.

  9. 9.

    What’s Wrong with Open-Data Sites—and How We Can Fix Them, by Cesar Hidalgo. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/what-s-wrong-with-open-data-sites-and-how-we-can-fix-them/ (last accessed: Oct 4, 2017).

Abbreviations

APIs:

Application Programming Interfaces

ICT:

Information and Communication Technology

OCT:

Open City Toolkit

SUS:

System Usability Scale

URL:

Uniform Resource Locator

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Acknowledgements

Comments from three anonymous reviewers have helped improve the clarity of the article. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Union through the GEO-C project (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014, Grant Agreement Number 642332, http://www.geo-c.eu/). Carlos Granell is funded by the Ramón y Cajal Programme (grant number RYC-2014-16913). Sergio Trilles is funded by the postdoctoral programme Vali+d (GVA) (grant number APOSTD/2016/058). We thank participants of the course “Geoinformation in Society” who volunteered to do the usability tests and employees from the city councils of Münster and Lisbon for their feedback. Finally, we thank Christian Kray and Marco Painho for the support provided during the course of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Auriol Degbelo & Jonas Wissing

  2. Institute of New Imaging Technologies, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón de la Plana, Spain

    Carlos Granell & Sergio Trilles

  3. NOVA Information Management School (NOVA IMS), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Devanjan Bhattacharya

Authors
  1. Auriol Degbelo
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  2. Carlos Granell
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  3. Sergio Trilles
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  4. Devanjan Bhattacharya
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  5. Jonas Wissing
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Correspondence to Auriol Degbelo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Urban Development and Design Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Scott Hawken

  2. City Planning, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Hoon Han

  3. Urban Science, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Christopher Pettit

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Degbelo, A., Granell, C., Trilles, S., Bhattacharya, D., Wissing, J. (2020). Tell Me How My Open Data Is Re-used: Increasing Transparency Through the Open City Toolkit. In: Hawken, S., Han, H., Pettit, C. (eds) Open Cities | Open Data. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6605-5_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6605-5_14

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