Release of more data is a good thing for citizens - Technology Industry News | Market & Trends | The Irish Times - Thu, May 23, 2013

"Getting data sets from inside government, semi-State and local bodies out into the public has been a significant part of IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative in Dublin. Of course, IBM didn’t think up this idea, nor is the company the main reason that an increasing array of data is now offered for public use, frequently at no charge, to be incorporated into apps and services and other uses. IBM’s involvement on such a large scale (Dublin is one of its set of global Smarter Cities, in which the company does a wide array of research, much of it collaborative, on the infrastructure and organisation of the city) has definitely oiled the gears of the open-data movement here. The idea behind open data internationally, is that government bodies, local authorities and other public organisations harbour vast amounts of data, generally gathered at public expense. Where there are no privacy or business sensitivity concerns around such data sets, making them available to the public allows citizens and businesses to do creative, useful things with that data, often things that the data-producing organisations do not have the time to do. President Obama recently announced a national open data policy for the US. The EU was there quite a bit earlier. It has had a general policy to release data for a couple of years with member states, encouraged to make as much data available as possible to citizens, ideally at no charge. The Government here has a policy that all government bodies should release at least some data for a three-year period. Each must make a list of its data holdings as part of this initiative ..."