Four Challenges for Open Data | Open Data Institute

We've seen an amazing growth of interest in open data within the UK and worldwide over the past half-dozen years, but in my opinion there are still some challenges ahead if we want to get to a situation in which open data is being used to its full potential, by government and businesses and individuals. No doubt there are others that you can come up with now, and that will emerge as we move forward, but these are the four that are top of my list. [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. I'm not just talking about licenses, or the format issues addressed by the five stars of open data, or even the community involvement tackled by the five stars of open data engagement, but barriers around comprehension and access and reliability ... [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. I wrote recently about Open Data Business Models that help public sector and third-sector organisations save money and deliver on their primary task, and for-profits make money, by publishing open data. Open data does not have to be all burden and no benefit for publishers... In addition, where resources are limited, organisations need to choose where to invest in increasing the quality of the open data they publish...  Data owners need to connect directly with current and potential reusers, to understand what they need and focus on those requirements. This doesn't preclude unanticipated reuse, but it does help ensure that effort isn't wasted in development work that only might be useful... [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... Statisticians have known how to handle figures responsibly for more than a century; as open data grows up, we need to embed that rigour into the analyses and visualisations we produce... [4]  Open Data is not Always Good... 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..."