It is time for Open Services | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-09-05

Summary:

"In a previous post, we advocated for the generation of a Public Digital Infrastructure (PDI), suggesting that governments should advance in the provision of open digital capabilities, free of restrictions, to do, within the law, whatever we want with them. These capabilities would be built on top of a national physical infrastructure and include data, services, software and knowledge. A lot has been written in the last couple of years about open data. An large number of advocates and an increasing government commitment (mostly related to transparency, but also approaching infrastructure provisioning) suggest a promising future for open data. Probably, ten years from today, the term 'open data' will no longer be used. 'Closed government data' will be the main related concern, because public data will be globally open, by default. On the road to Public Digital Infrastructure development, we propose going one step further from open data. We must move on to Open Government Services. The Open Government Service definition we are proposing is slightly different from the one of Open Software Service from OKFN. While Open Software Services aim to be the 'open source' version of online services, Open Government Services are more the service-version of Open Data: online services for exposing data and performing computation, without access restrictions and verifiable results ... There are some additional features of data that make Open Services not only convenient, but also necessary: [1] Real-time data: this is information delivered immediately after collection. Consider, for example, the Transport for London Live Bus Arrivals. The Open Data approach is not plausible: one of the most important features of these data is its availability right now. In fact, the London transport website includes a 'Developers Section' that provides services for checking arrival times. [2] Big data: I take 'big data' as the opposite of small data: the amount of data you cannot conveniently store and process on a single high-end laptop or server. Open data is supposed to make things easier for people; if you need a supercomputer to analyze open data, then it is not open anymore. In this case, open services would allow the user to refine her queries and get the data she is interested in. A good example is the huge data section of the National Climatic Data Center; if it wasn’t for their services, data access would be almost impossible.  As you can see, there are already many examples of services on open data. However, we should start thinking not just about services on open data, but directly about open services. Emulating what has been done for Open Data, we suggest the following principles for Open Services: [1] Open Services should be based on open data. Open Services should never substitute Open Data. I repeat, never. They are intended to make things easier, not for preventing access. [2] Open Services should be verifiable. Since Open Services include Open Data and algorithms, we need a way to check results are what we expect, and are not being modified during processing. The most obvious way to comply with this is to publish the algorithms and processes besides the data (in our bus timetable, the interpolation algorithm). But there could be other forms of verifiability: in the real-time bus data, we can simply check if the bus is where the service says, just by going to the real place. [3] Open Services should be open for everybody, with no limitations, except for security reasons. No registration, no justification. Exactly the same principle we applied to open data. [4] Open Services should be accessible through Open Standards, which no entity has exclusive control (*)."

Link:

http://blog.okfn.org/2013/09/04/it-is-time-for-open-services/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.psi oa.comment oa.tools oa.okfn oa.definitions oa.government oa.data

Date tagged:

09/05/2013, 07:45

Date published:

09/05/2013, 03:45