Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone subject only, at most, to the

e requirement to attribute and sharealike. The key features are: 1. Availability and Access: the data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form. 2. Reuse and Redistribution: the data must be provided under terms that permit reuse and redistribution including the intermixing with other datasets. The data must be machine-readable. 3. Universal Participation: everyone must be able to use, reuse and redistribute there should be no discrimination against fields of endeavor 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. What Kinds of Open Data

Why Open Data? 1. Transparency. In a well-functioning, democratic society citizens need to know what their government is doing. To do that, they must be able freely to access government data and information and to share that information with other citizens. Transparency isnt just about access, it is also about sharing and reuse often, to understand material it needs to be analyzed and visualized and this requires that the material be open so that it can be freely used and reused. 2. Releasing social and commercial value. In a digital age, data is a key resource for social and commercial activities. Everything from finding your local post office to building a search engine requires access to data, much of which is created or held by government. By opening up data, government can help drive the creation of innovative business and services that deliver social and commercial value. 3. Participation and engagement participatory governance or for business and organizations engaging with your users and audience. Much of the time citizens are only able to engage with their own governance sporadically maybe just at an election every 4 or 5 years. By opening up data, citizens are enabled to be much more directly informed and involved in decision-making.

This is more than transparency: its about making a full read/write society, not just about knowing what is happening in the process of governance but being able to contribute to it. How to Open Up Data 3 Key Rules There are three key rules we recommend following when opening up data:
1. Keep it simple. Start out small, simple and fast. There is no requirement

that every dataset must be made open right now. Starting out by opening up just one dataset, or even one part of a large dataset, is fine of course, the more datasets you can open up the better. 2. Engage early and engage often. Engage with actual and potential users and re-users of the data as early and as often as you can, be they citizens, businesses or developers. This will ensure that the next iteration of your service is as relevant as it can be.
3. Address common fears and misunderstandings. This is especially

important if you are working with or within large institutions such as government. When opening up data you will encounter plenty of questions and fears. It is important to (a) identify the most important ones and (b) address them at as early a stage as possible. The Four Steps These are in very approximate order many of the steps can be done simultaneously. 1. Choose your dataset(s). Choose the dataset(s) you plan to make open. Keep in mind that you can (and may need to) return to this step if you encounter problems at a later stage. 2. Apply an open license. a. Determine what intellectual property rights exist in the data. b. Apply a suitable open license that licenses all of these rights and supports the definition of openness discussed in the section above on What Open Data c. NB: if you cant do this go back to step 1 and try a different dataset. 3. Make the data available in bulk and in a useful format. You may also wish to consider alternative ways of making it available such as via an API.

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Make it discoverable post on the web and perhaps organize a central catalog to list your open datasets.

Four Challenges for Open Data 1. Free is not Always Open There has been a welcome push recently to make data, particularly government data, freely available to whomever wants to use it. But making data freely available is only the first step in making it open for all to reuse. There are layers of barriers between information that anyone can get and data that anyone can use. For example: a. Datasets that are only available as batch downloads raise barriers for those who are only interested in a portion of the dataset; those that are only available through an API make accessing the entire dataset for global analysis difficult. b. When organisations want to build businesses on top of open data, they don't just need the data itself, but also guarantees around persistence, reliability, accuracy and general ongoing maintenance that enable them to invest in it without being concerned about the world shifting beneath their feet. 2. Open is not Always Free Raising the standard of open data releases, to lower the barriers for reusers of that data as described above, can be costly, and organisations are rarely motivated by benefits that come to other people. If they are going to be publish open data, they need to find an incentive to do so that is closer to home. 3. Analysis is not Always Easy Open data, and the plethora of tools that make it easy to visualise, can lure us into a false sense of comprehension. We can take a list of areas with associated numbers of cancer deaths, throw them into a map and pick out the lightest and darkest areas as being best and worst. But all too often we do this without thinking about whether the differences between the figures are either statistically or practically significant. 4. Purely a Tool The final challenge for our aspirations for open data is that open data is purely a tool: it is not good in and of itself. Open data can help people make more informed decisions, but it can equally mislead people into making poor decisions, or enable individuals to make good decisions for themselves that, in aggregate, lead to a more divided society. Meeting the Challenges Addressing the challenges by a. studying and spreading the word about open data successes and failures, to help us all learn from each other b. helping data reusers to innovate around open data to drive good decision making c. helping data owners to publish their data in ways that maximise the benefits to themselves, the reusers of their data, and society as a whole d. contributing to the development of tools, services and standards to support this work OPEN DATA VS BIG DATA

THEY ARE NOT THE SAME AT ALL. DATASETS ARE OPEN IF THEY ARE AVAILABLE UNDER A FREE LICENSE TO EVERYONE. DATASETS ARE BIG. TYPICALLY BIG BEYOND WHERE COMMON SOFTWARE CAN HANDLE THEM IN REAL TIME. FOR EXAMPLE FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE WORK WITH BIG DATA THAT IS NOT OPEN. MOST OPEN DATA SETS ARE ACTUALLY AN EXAMPLE OF SMALL DATA: THE DATASETS THEMSELVES ARE NOT HUGE, BUT THERE IS A LARGE NUMBER OF THEM THAT CAN BE CORRELATED TO INCREASE THEIR VALUE. BIG DATA DESCRIBES THE PROCESS OF THE COLLECTING, STORING, AND ANALYZING OF FRAGMENTS OF INFORMATION THAT CAN BE RAPIDLY ASSEMBLED TO IDENTIFY SUBTLE MACRO TRENDS OR CREATE ACTIONABLE PROFILES THAT PRECISELY TARGET UNIQUE INDIVIDUALS. OPEN DATA ON THE OTHER HAND DESCRIBES A CORPORATE POLICY WHICH PERMITS CERTAIN DATA TO BE FREELY AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE TO USE AND REPUBLISH AS THEY WISH, WITHOUT RESTRICTIONS FROM COPYRIGHT, PATENTS OR OTHER FORMS OF CONTROL. EACH DAY, ORGANIZATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS CREATE NEARLY 2.5 QUINTILLION BYTES OF DATA. THIS DATA GENERATION RATE PRODUCES SO MUCH DATA THAT NEARLY 90% OF THE DATA IN THE WORLD TODAY HAS BEEN CREATED IN THE LAST TWO YEARS ALONE.