The document discusses how to maximize the benefits of open data by maximizing its reuse. It identifies four key areas to focus on: legal, practical, technical, and social. Legally, data should have an unrestricted license and not contain private information. Practically, data needs to be timely, accurate, and reliably available. Technically, data should be machine-readable, in an appropriate format, and use open standards. Socially, there needs to be documentation, feedback mechanisms, community building, and tools to work with the data. The document concludes that simply focusing on format is not enough and these other areas also need attention to help people understand and easily work with the open data.

1. Maximising the
Benefits of Open
Data
Stuart Harrison @pezholio
Web Developer, ODI
stuart.harrison@theodi.org

2. Maximising Benefits =
Maximising Reuse
• Legal
●
What can I (legally) do with this data?
• Practical
●
How reliable is the data? Frequency of
updates?
• Technical
●
What format is the data in?
• Social
●
Where can I go to with problems?

3. Legal
• what can I do with the data?
• clear, simple, unrestricted licences
●
Open Government Licence
• no contaminating closed data
●
extract out derived & copied data
• no data protection concerns
●
consent for re-use

4. Practical
• timeliness
●
frequency of changes / releases
●
lag in releases
• quality control
●
accuracy of the data
• guarantees
●
availability (particularly of APIs)
●
on-going publication

5. Technical
• machine-readable
●
not images of tables
• suitable to data type
●
appropriate format & vocabulary
• open standard
●
with open source implementations
• using URIs as identifiers
●
helps with linking up disparate
datasets

6. Social
• documentation
• gather feedback to improve
●
every dataset contains mistakes
●
email, form or API for corrections
• build community
●
forum / group to share experience
• provide tools
●
libraries for operating with the data

7. Conclusions
• 5 star scheme only covers format
• also need to help re-users
●
work out what they can do
●
work out what they can rely on
●
work with the data easily
●
engage with you & others

8. What do you think?
comment on alpha ODI Open Data
Certificate
http://theodi.github.com/open-data-certificate/
questions?
@pezholio
stuart.harrison@theodi.org