Open Data
#opendata from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.
Taken from the excellent Open Data Manual.
What is Open Data?
Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.
The full Open Definition gives precise details as to what this means but to summarize the most important:
Availability and Access: the data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.
Reuse and Redistribution: the data must be provided under terms that permit reuse and redistribution including the intermixing with other datasets.
Universal Participation: everyone must be able to use, reuse redistribute – there should be no discrimination against fields of endeavour or against persons or groups. For example, ‘non-commercial’ restrictions that would prevent ‘commercial’ use or restrictions of use for certain purposes (e.g. only in education) are not allowed.
Why Open Data?
Open data, especially open government data and data for development aid, is a tremendous resource that is largely untapped. Many different individuals and organisations collect a broad range of different types of data to be able to perform their tasks. Government is particularly significant in this regard, both because of the quantity and centrality of the data they collect, but also because of all that government data, most is public data by law, and therefore could be made open and made available for others to use. Why is that useful?
There are many areas where we can expect open data to be of value, and where examples already exist. There are also many different groups of people and organisations who can benefit from the availability of open data, including government itself. At the same time it is impossible to predict precisely how and where value will be created. The nature of innovation and new things is that it will come from unlikely places.
It is already possible to point to a large number of areas where open government data is creating value, and there are likely more. Some of these areas are:
- Transparency and democratic control
- Participation
- Self-empowerment
- Improved or new private products and services
- Innovation
- Improved efficiency of government services
- Improved effectiveness of government services
- Impact measurement of policies
- New knowledge from combined data sources and patterns in large data volumes
For more information please check out the film on open data by the Open Knowledge Foundation.