The State of Open Data in Europe

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Opening up government data to the public has been part of the European policy agenda since the introduction of the PSI directive in 2003. European Member States continue to lean towards a cautious approach of making their data available to citizens.

This is partly caused by conflicting legal frameworks, cultural norms and the idea to recover the costs of data production. At the same time and inspired by activities in the U.S. and UK, the open data movement has emerged in many countries around the globe. They have a simple demand: Government agencies should put as much of their data online as possible in a machine-readable format so that everyone can re-use it since they were paid for by taxes.

This study analyses the current state of the open data policy ecosystem and open government data offerings in nine European Member States. Since none of the countries studied currently offers a national open data
portal, this study compares the statistics offices’ online data offerings.

The analysis shows that they fulfill a number of open data principles but that there is still a lot of room for improvement. This study underlines that the development of data catalogues and portals should not be seen as means to an end.

URL : http://assets1.csc.com/de/downloads/CSC_policy_paper_series_01_2011_unchartered_waters_state_of_open_data_europe_English_2.pdf

Guide pratique de l’ouverture des donné…

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Guide pratique de l’ouverture des données publiques territoriales :

“L’ouverture des données publiques n’est pas une option pour les acteurs publics : elle est rendue obligatoire par des directives européennes et une législation française qui en a fait un droit opposable.

Mais cette ouverture constitue également, et surtout, une chance. En s’y engageant, les acteurs publics ont l’occasion de gagner en efficacité, de contribuer au développement économique et à l’amélioration de nombreux services aux habitants comme aux entreprises, de faire émerger des connaissances inédites sur un territoire, et enfin de partager les éléments de la décision publique avec une société civile qui le demande.

Il s’agit donc d’une véritable opportunité pour les territoires, qui plus est moins coûteuse et moins complexe qu’il n’y parait de prime abord. Chaque territoire la saisira à sa manière, en expérimentant et généralisant. Malgré tout, de nombreux éléments doivent être pris en compte : juridiques, techniques, économiques, organisationnels. Plusieurs territoires en Europe, et en France, montrent la voie : leur expérience a vocation à servir aux autres.

Ce Guide pratique s’inscrit dans la démarche d’accompagnement des territoires initiée par la FING autour de la Réutilisation des données publiques. Ce guide se donne pour objectifs d’apporter des éclairages et d’inviter les acteurs publics à agir. Des moyens, des outils sont déjà à portée de main, des initiatives existantes, en France comme à l’étranger, constituent déjà des bonnes pratiques, ou à tout le moins des sources d’enseignement.”

URL : http://www.reseaufing.org/pg/blog/openid_82/read/52200/guide-pratique-de-louverture-des-donnes-publiques-territoriales

Friends or Foes? Creative Commons, Freed…

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Friends or Foes? Creative Commons, Freedom of Information Law and the EU Framework for Re-Use of Public Sector Information :

“Public authorities keep vast amounts of information. Freedom of information (‘FOIA’) laws give the public rights of access to much public sector information. The spread of FOIAs across the globe testifies to their importance as instruments for enhancing democratic accountability. But access to public sector information not only serves political purposes. It is also thought to have economic benefits, enabling the development of new information products and services. This is the policy objective behind the EU Directive 2003/98 on the Re-use of Public Sector Information (PSI Directive).

Despite popular belief to the contrary, much public sector information is subject to intellectual property rights. Both access to public sector information for democratic purposes and for economic purposes have implications for how intellectual property rights in information produced by governments are exercised. Rather curiously perhaps, FOIA’s are generally silent on the issue. Nor does the PSI Directive prescribe how public sector bodies should exercise any exlcusive rights in information. This paper explores the role of copyright policy in the light of the objectives and principles of both freedom of information law and the regulatory framework for re-use of public sector information. More specifically, it queries whether open content licenses like Creative Commons are indeed the attractive instrument they appear to be for public sector bodies that seek to enhance transparent access to their information, be it for purposes of democratic accountability or re-use for economic or other uses.”

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1722189

Supporting Science through the Interoper…

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Supporting Science through the Interoperability of Data and Articles :

“Whereas it is established practice to publish relevant findings of a research project in a scientific article, there are no standards yet as to whether and how to make the underlying research data publicly accessible. According to the recent PARSE.Insight study of the EU, over 84% of scientists think it is useful to link underlying digital research data to peer-reviewed literature.This trend is reinforced by funding bodies, who — to an increasing extent — require the grantees to deposit their raw datasets at freely accessible repositories. And also the publishing industry believes that raw datasets should be made freely accessible. This article presents an overview of how Elsevier as a scientific publisher with over 2,000 journals gives context to articles that are available on their full-text platform SciVerse ScienceDirect, by linking out to externally hosted data at the article level, at the entity level, and in a deeply integrated way. With this overview, Elsevier invites dataset repositories to collaborate with publishers to create an optimal interoperability between the formal scientific literature and the associated research data — improving the scientific workflow and ultimately supporting science.”

The Dataverse Network®: An Open-Source A…

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The Dataverse Network®: An Open-Source Application for Sharing, Discovering and Preserving Data :

“The Dataverse Network is an open-source application for publishing, referencing, extracting and analyzing research data. The main goal of the Dataverse Network is to solve the problems of data sharing through building technologies that enable institutions to reduce the burden for researchers and data publishers, and incentivize them to share their data. By installing Dataverse Network software, an institution is able to host multiple individual virtual archives, called “dataverses” for scholars, research groups, or journals, providing a data publication framework that supports author recognition, persistent citation, data discovery and preservation. Dataverses require no hardware or software costs, nor maintenance or backups by the data owner, but still enable all web visibility and credit to devolve to the data owner.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january11/crosas/01crosas.html

Quality of Research Data, an Operational Approach

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This article reports on a study, commissioned by SURFfoundation, investigating the operational aspects of the concept of quality for the various phases in the life cycle of research data: production, management, and use/re-use.

Potential recommendations for quality improvement were derived from interviews and a study of the literature. These recommendations were tested via a national academic survey of three disciplinary domains as designated by the European Science Foundation: Physical Sciences and Engineering, Social Sciences and Humanities, and Life Sciences.

The “popularity” of each recommendation was determined by comparing its perceived importance against the objections to it. On this basis, it was possible to draw up generic and discipline-specific recommendations for both the dos and the don’ts.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january11/waaijers/01waaijers.html

Emerging Search Regimes: Measuring Co-ev…

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Emerging Search Regimes: Measuring Co-evolutions among Research, Science, and Society :

“Scientometric data is used to investigate empirically the emergence of search regimes in Biotechnology, Genomics, and Nanotechnology. Complex regimes can emerge when three independent sources of variance interact. In our model, researchers can be considered as the nodes that carry the science system. Research is geographically situated with site-specific skills, tacit knowledge and infrastructures. Second, the emergent science level refers to the formal communication of codified knowledge published in journals. Third, the socio-economic dynamics indicate the ways in which knowledge production relates to society. Although Biotechnology, Genomics, and Nanotechnology can all be characterised by rapid growth and divergent dynamics, the regimes differ in terms of self-organization among these three sources of variance. The scope of opportunities for researchers to contribute within the constraints of the existing body of knowledge are different in each field. Furthermore, the relevance of the context of application contributes to the knowledge dynamics to various degrees.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2591