Open Data Policies: Impediments and Challenges

Abstract: Up till now, there has been a public demand for opening up non privacy-sensitive governmental data. In 2003, the EU Public Sector Information (PSI) directive was released, which aims to enable the availability of public sector data to third parties at low prices, unrestrictive conditions and ensuring a level playing field. From that moment many countries and public agencies have started to open their data. The open data movement is guided by PSI-directives and national policies and the definition of open data indicates that the data are accessible without any restrictions on usage and distribution. However, the current use of open PSI is accompanied by many impediments. Hence, in this paper the question is asked which policy measures could be proposed to overcome the impediments that open data policies currently encounter. Based on a literature overview and two use-cases the impediments that open data policies currently encounter are analyzed and categorized in four categories: 1) political, economical, technical and social impediments, 2) data access impediments, 3) data deposition impediments and 4) data use impediments. The impediments are categorized using a fishbone diagram. The analysis shows that open data policies provide scant attention to the user perspective. Based on the impediment overview important challenges for open data policies are identified. To broaden the use of open data we recommend to introduce 1) incentive policy guidelines to stimulate centralization of open data collections and to rectify the fragmentation, 2) creating access to open data to enable the use of open data for any user, 3) creating interoperability by adding structured metadata when making data available to ensure easy discovery and understanding of its potential and 4) creating an infrastructure for the processing of PSI.