Open Data

Open Data

Definition

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

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

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