Coupling Public Sector Information and Public-Funded Research Data in Europe: A Vision of an Open Data Ecosystem - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 293

data platforms, using mainstream technologies (e.g., CKAN), should be particu-
larly investigated.
6. While establishing the required tools, the definition of the responsible parties
and the partnerships to host the required infrastructure/platform/framework
remains a major challenge. Most of the projects in the central part of this chap-
ter acknowledged the need to seek sustainable models to ensure the feasibility
of the underlying infrastructures beyond the project duration. Public-private
partnerships and consortium have to be explored. Furthermore, practitioners in
public and research sectors should, by principle, consider also open tools.
7. Context is essential to be able to use (open) data. It will be fundamental to
find a common way to describe, manage, and handle context commonly. This
is widely recognized both in PSI and research data projects and initiatives,
such as RDA and Europeana. Given that location is particularly relevant to shape
contextual information, we expect an increase in geospatial information linked
to PSI and scientific data, which will impact future data management systems.
13.6 Areas for Future Research
As the previous text illustrates, the creation of an open data ecosystem including
both public sector and research data is an evolving process. To continuously prog-
ress on the diverse items identified above, we see a particular need to address the
following research questions (in italics):
1. First, we need to move away from open access as a “yes/no” question to a
question of “how.” How do we benefit from experiences and lesson learned across
disciplines?
2. All of the mentioned initiatives imply long-term curation and preservation
needs. Which organizational structures are needed to set up and maintain such
data infrastructures?
3. The open access to databases is necessary, but not sufficient, to reach trans-
parency and to empower diverse audiences to use the unlocked resources.
How might public application programming interfaces allow not only access to
but also understanding and proper usage of open data sets?
4. The citizen component is expected to get a more prominent role—in relation
to science, as well as policy making. How could we foster civic engagement
based on open data and, as part of that, which privacy and ethical issues have to
be considered?
Apart from these burning issues, we should continuously remind ourselves of
two central questions: Once all of the items discussed so far have been resolved,
who would want to use the new ecosystem? And who will be able to use it? In the
future, developed thematic expertise will have to be increasingly complemented