Open Government Data: A European Perspective - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 2

Abstract
The aim of the open government movement is for democratic govern-
ments to become more transparent, facilitating greater collaboration
and participation among the administration, politicians, business rep-
resentatives, and the general public. The concept of Open Government
Data (OGD) denotes the provision of public sector information, to
make public data available for stakeholders to store, use, and redistrib-
ute without restriction or charge. Many initiatives worldwide have been
undertaken to develop web portals facilitating access to public sector
data. The aim of this chapter is to examine the growing implementation
of OGD, analyzing the data disclosed by the central governments of the
European Union (EU) member countries through their official OGD
websites. The methodology used is based on four analytical approaches:
functions, semantics, quality, and content. The results obtained show,
first, considerable heterogeneity among EU portals and, second, that
the implementation of OGD portals in Europe is at an intermediate
level of development. At present, the results obtained suggest that the
countries of the EU are making little use of the feedback possibilities
offered by their portals and, in many, cases do not allow the introduc-
tion of new data.
Keywords: public sector information (PSI), e-government, linked data,
metadata, EU
1.1 introduction
In recent years, public sector bodies have been urged by stakeholders to provide greater
transparency about the use of resources, greater participation in the management of
these resources, greater accountability by public managers, and greater access to the
information processed and used by government (Sonáglio, 2013). In response to these
demands, since the early 1990s, new forms of public management have been applied,
and one of the most commonly adopted means of modernizing public administration
is to make use of technological advances such as the Internet, thus enabling electronic
public administration, or e-government (Khan, Young, & Park, 2012).
With the emergence of diverse forms of social media and with technological
advances, in recent years, Web 2.0 tools have been developed, based on concepts such
as Government 2.0 or open government (Osimo, Campbell, Kerr-Stevens, Bishop, &
Bryant, 2009). This has led to the provision of online services based on interactivity,
using new technologies such as social networking, mashups, open data platforms, inter-
active television, and interactive mobile platforms (Chun, Shulman, & Sandoval, 2010;
Harrison et al., 2011; Khan et al., 2012; Mergel, 2010). The aim of the open government