Open Government Data: A European Perspective - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 4

to the problem, it is funding Project HOMER (Harmonising open data in the
Mediterranean through better access and reuse of PSI), the main objective of which
is to establish an effective strategy for harmonizing open data policies and portals
in Mediterranean countries, to be implemented by both regional and local govern-
ments (HOMER, 2014).
Taking into account the above considerations, this study examines the growing
implementation of OGD, analyzing the data disclosed by the central governments
of the EU member countries through their official OGD websites. We hope that
this research gives rise to greater awareness of the potential benefits to society and
European governments from the use of OGD and of the need to create a common
framework for access to public data and for their reuse within the EU.
This chapter is organized in seven sections. After this introduction, Section
1.2 provides an overview of the OGD initiative. Section 1.3 then analyzes the dif-
ferent ways in which PSI is provided, produced, and classified. In Section 1.4, we
describe the research methodology applied and show how the sample selection was
obtained. In Sections 1.5 and 1.6, respectively, we present and discuss the results
obtained, and in Section 1.7, the main conclusions are presented.
1.2 the oGD initiative
The OGD movement emerged in 2004-2005 as the expression of transparency and
open government, with particular focus on improvement of democratic processes
(Davies, 2010; OKFN and Access-Info, 2010), greater availability of knowledge and
information about the public sector (OKFN and Access-Info, 2010), the reuse of
this information by sectors of society and business (Davies, 2010), and technological
advances in the field of linked data, through the Semantic Web (Tinati et al., 2012).
Coleman (2011) and Davies (2010) have argued that OGD initiatives are largely
the result of demands made by a growing minority of civil society and business
interests for the government to disclose public information and to allow its reuse
under “Open Definition” terms (http://opendefinition.org/okd). This would mean
the data being published online proactively, in technically open formats, allowing
access free of charge for citizens and at a lower marginal cost for governments, mak-
ing use of the Conformant License. However, OGD initiatives originated in the
academic world, as a development-oriented movement created by scientific com-
munities to ensure free access to the data published in online academic libraries
(Murray-Rust, 2008).
One of the key factors in the development of the OGD initiative, according to
Alexopoulos, Spiliotopoulou, and Charalabidis (2013), has been the use of tech-
nological resources, particularly the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. The first
initiatives in the greater availability of public data, based on Web 1.0, were character-
ized by the use of infrastructure by means of which data were published in formats
that were not processable by machines (e.g., PDF), lacking context information or