Open Government Data: A European Perspective - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 7

With respect to how PSI records should be opened and shared, OGD initia-
tives are fairly recent, and thus far, little has been done to establish a classification
scheme. However, studies conducted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C,
2009) and by Berners-Lee (2009, 2010) are taken as benchmarks for determining
levels of openness and data availability.
The W3C, an e-government interest group, has established three stages in
which public administrations should provide and share their data (W3C, 2009):
first, the publication of data as files in well-known, open formats (i.e., not requiring
a user's license), such as CSV or XML; second, the creation of online catalogues;
and finally, making the published data machine readable.
Berners-Lee (2009) suggests that governments publish information in accor-
dance with the principles of linked data. The main difference between the hyper-
text web and the semantic web is that the former links pages or documents by
HTML, whereas the latter goes beyond the “document” concept to link structured
data (Berners-Lee, 2009). This author also proposed a five-star maturity model with
which to measure the ways in which public data are published, according to the
reuse and linkage characteristics observed (see Table 1.1).
Shadbolt and O'Hara (2013) claim that data linking enhances the benefits of
open data, because with less effort, users can access more information content.
Moreover, data linking makes it possible to create a data network with decentral-
ized, heterogeneous sources, and RDF data can be interconnected via URI links
(Hausenblas, 2009).
Both and Schieferdecker (2012) point out the important role played by users
as a valuable source of OGD feedback, by notifying the editors of an OGD
catalogue of records with missing information and by detecting an incorrect
description of a data set. In this respect, open data can help establish a favorable

table 1.1 Five Stars of Linked Data Classification for Linked oGD

* Data are published online under an open license (e.g., PDF).

** Data are published in machine-readable format (e.g., as an Excel

spreadsheet).

*** Data are published in machine-readable, nonproprietary format,

using open standards such as CSV.

**** Data are published in accordance with linked-data principles, such

as RDF.

***** Available data are linked to other RDF data.

Source: Berners-Lee, T. (2010). Design issues: Linked data . Retrieved April 2, 2014,
from http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html.