Open Data

Open Data

This concept is used in two different contexts, i.e. both as the availability of scientific raw datam and as open access to publicly funded, 'government' information.

Definition concerning public information

Refers to the campaign for the openness of data collected by government, against company-centric licensing regimes which withhold access to publicly funded data to the public at large.

More info at http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=98. This article specifically focuses on geographic datasets in the UK.

Free Our Data is a UK-based campaign.

Definition in Science

Peter Murray-Rust of the Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics at the University of Cambridge (UK):

“The emerging Open Data movement shares many goals with the Open Access and Open Source movements, but encompasses its own distinct issues that are in need of examination by the scientific community. Many advocates of Open Data believe that, although there are substantial potential benefits from sharing and reusing digital data upon which scientific advances are built, today much of it is being lost or underutilized because of legal, technological and other barriers." (http://www.arl.org/sparc/announce/102405.html)

Requirements for Open Data in science

Quoted from http://www.windley.com/archives/2006/05/free_the_data.shtml

• Re-use structures including schemas and ontologies. It’s more important to use well-understood structures than to use any particular idiom.

• Re-use the licenses that have already been developed. Licensing meta-data (ala Creative Commons) is also important.

• Enable re-use of ideas (contrasted with the expression of the idea). We have to find the proper scope of ‘derivative works’ and re-examine the issue of database copyright. Shockingly, copying the bibliographic data from a work (for purposes of citation) can be seen as a violation of some licenses.

• Attach policy information that says how the information can be used. Some experimental data depends critically on personally identifying information. Anonymization is a hard task either not working well or being at odds with the underlying research purpose of the data.

• Use open standards

(Weitzner presentation at http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0525-web-data-publishing/#(3); qutoed here [1])

More Information

Concering Public Data

See the campaign Free Our Data

Concerning Scientific Data

SPARC Open Data Email Discussion List, at http://www.arl.org/sparc/opendata/index.html