Open Data Across the EU | HuffPost
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-02
Summary:
"The barriers countries face on the road to open data maturity are numerous, and the report breaks them down into five main categories:
- Political barriers, which are faced by roughly 1/3 of countries in the EU. Policy makers remain too often ignorant of the virtues of open data.
- Legal barriers are also common, even at the basic level of providing a legal framework to support open data.
- Technical barriers are numerous, but none more so than the quality of data captured, which remains often unstructured and non-machine readable.
- Financial barriers are as much cultural as anything, with a shift from institutions selling their data to giving it away for free.
- Other barriers also exist, largely around things such as awareness raising, among both businesses and the public.
Whilst clear and evident progress has been made in each of these areas, the researchers believe more can be done, and make a number of recommendations.
- Implement an Open Data strategy which states that all data needs an open licence; which stimulates the creation of an Open Data policy; emphasize the importance of a legal structure addressing privacy aspects and standards
- Improve the national portal by adding basic functionalities and enhancing the quality of the data: develop automated processes to collect data from public administrations and focus on consistent and coherent metadata quality.
- Increase awareness around Open Data by organizing more events and training and by diversifying the type of events; focus on raising awareness around the skills needed to work with data.
- Launch activities to monitor the impact of Open Data. Knowing the impact of using Open Data, can also help increase the awareness, which in turn results in more Open Data, and hence more use of Open Data.
The team plan to return with the next edition of the report in a years time, and it will be interesting to see the progress that is made."