Welcoming a New Era of Dynamic Open Data | AI3:::Adaptive Information

It would be an understatement to say that open data has been transforming how government does business. Over the past five years — ranging from national governments such as the United States and the United Kingdom to hundreds of local governments and municipalities and all forms of government in between — a veritable revolution in opening up data to the public has been underway. The open data in government (OGD) movement has spawned an entirely new cottage industry in open data advocacy and tools. Literally hundreds of government organizations are committed to open data, supported by an ecosystem of advocacy, technology and consulting groups. Open data, of course, is not limited to governments. Open data in science and from the Web and for-profit entities are legitimate focal points in their own right. But, because data generated by governments are both sanctioned and developed using taxpayer monies, open data in government (OGD) occupies a special place in the conversation. Now, with experience and practice, we are beginning to see a generational shift in how open data is being handled by governments. The first generation, still mostly the current practice, was built around the idea of just making the data public and open. This current generation of open data is characterized by the publishing of datasets via catalogs. The datasets are static, unconnected and dumb. Mostly, too, the data within those datasets are poorly described and documented, often lacking standard metadata. What is now exciting, however, is the emergence of what can best be called dynamic open data. What this is and how it offers advantages is the focus of this article. In October 2007, 30 open government advocates met in Sebastopol, California to discuss how government could open up electronically-stored government data for public use. Up until that point, the federal and state governments had made some data available to the public, usually inconsistently and incompletely, which had whetted the advocates’ appetites for more and better data. The conference, led by Carl Malamud and Tim O’Reilly and funded by a grant from the Sunlight Foundation, resulted in eight principles that, if implemented, would empower the public’s use of government-held data. These principles, no longer online, were summarized by Joshua Tauberer in his Open Government Data book as: [1] Data Must be Complete All public data are made available. Data are electronically stored information or recordings, including but not limited to documents, databases, transcripts, and audio/visual recordings. Public data are data that are not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations, as governed by other statutes. [2] Data Must be Primary Data are published as collected at the source, with the finest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.  [3] Data Must be Timely  Data are made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.  [4] Data Must be Accessible  Data are available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.  [5] Data Must be Machine Processable  Data are reasonably structured to allow automated processing of it.  [6] Access Must be Non-Discriminatory  Data are available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.  [7] Data Formats Must be Non-Proprietary  Data are available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.  [8] Data Must be License-free  Data are not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed as governed by other statutes.

These basic principles were then updated and re-phrased by the Sunlight Foundation in August 2010 to now number 10 principles, including the use of open standards, making data permanent, and keeping usage costs to an absolute minimum. All of these are laudable points. Each may or may not be provided in a fully open way by any given governmental entity ... Of course, simply throwing data over the fence does not make it useful. Once we can get past the first threshold of making data publicly accessible, we next face the challenge of making that data meaningful and relevant. Since relevance is in the eye of the user, we no longer can think about information solely in terms of static, dumb datasets. We now need to