Developments and Potential in Open Data: Exploring the Growth of the Field
Open data has become a global movement and gained momentum around the world with both governments and private sector organisations recognizing the value of making data more accessible and usable. It has great potential for driving innovation, economic growth and social change.
Open data refers to the idea that certain data should be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone for any reason. The past 25 years have seen significant progress in the development and promotion of open data policies and practices.
We have seen exceptional growth in the publication and use of open data for many years. In Estonia, the volume of open data has increased by more than 35 times in the last 4 years from 40 datasets to over 1550 datasets. Such trend is evident worldwide.
Government institutions can gain trust from open data
In the democratic Western world it is unimaginable that information regarding public procurements, parliamentary hearings and government budget planning is not publicly available. Open data has gained importance in the public sector in the last two decades because by making information more accessible to citizens we can improve transparency and accountability of a governance structure. When done well and consistently, it can lead to higher trust in government and public institutions.
There are various indexes that assess the transparency of a government. For example, the OECD OURdata Index assesses governments’ efforts to implement open data in three critical areas — Openness, Usefulness and Re-usability, and it is used to assess OECD countries activities regarding transparency, accountability and data re-use.
In the years to come, it is anticipated that the private sector will have a more significant role in publishing open data.
Open Data can create monetary value
Open data can fuel innovation and stimulate economic growth by providing entrepreneurs, researchers, and developers with access to data that can be used to create new products and services.
At first glance, the concept of open data from a business perspective may seem counterintuitive, as it involves giving away valuable assets. However, there are both inbound and outbound benefits associated with this approach.
One such benefit is the ability to encourage customers and collaborators to experiment with the data, potentially leading to partnerships that can drive business growth without incurring additional expenses. Additionally, philanthropic activities can be pursued through the publication of open data, allowing companies to support social causes and make a positive impact on society.
For example, Google’s Maps provides developers and businesses with access to a wealth of geospatial data. By publishing this data as open data, Google has enabled other businesses to build applications and services that leverage its platform, driving innovation and growth in the industry. For instance, Ford shares data about its vehicles with developers, enabling them to create apps that enhance charging efficiency, driving experience, develop autonomous vehicle software and other innovative services.
The 2020 report on the Economic Value of Open Data estimated that the open data market size was at €184 billion, forecasted to reach between €199.51 and €334.21 billion by 2025. Today, open data is already used to fuel the development of artificial intelligence in areas like agriculture, climate, and language technology, and to provide services in areas like insurance, transportation, and energy production.
The impact of open data
The growth of open data was to some extent fuelled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Which highlighted the importance of open data in addressing global crises. Governments and organizations around the world shared data related to the pandemic openly and collaboratively, leading to more rapid and effective responses to the crisis.
Increasing expectations have paved the way for the concept of high-value datasets — data with high economic and societal impact are to be prioritized by governments. European Commission defined the first six categories of high-value datasets in 2023 — a trend that is likely to continue.
Open data relies on community
A major player in the field has been the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) which was founded in 2004 to promote open access to information and open data. The OKF has played an important role in advocating for open data policies and supporting the development of tools and platforms for sharing and collaborating on open data.
Among other things, OKF has played a major role in the development of CKAN, which is the world’s leading open-source data management system and used by many governments and organisations around the world. Thus, the focus may have been on sharing and re-using data, but the process has resulted in a global community who shares and re-uses resources and tools created.
Making data available with the right licencing
Open data is typically expected to be machine-readable and without any restrictions from copyright, patents, or other mechanisms of control, but this may not be the case. An important mechanism to clarify how data can be used and whether there are any restrictions to its use, are licences.
Licencing terms are gaining focus, as more and more non-governmental organisations are actively making data available. Examples are abundant, among others Coco — the large-scale object detection, segmentation, and captioning dataset, and YouTube-8M Segments dataset. Moreover, this has sparked new ways to collaborate — for instance, Kaggle allows users to find datasets they want to use in building AI models, publish datasets, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.
Coming back to the licencing, in certain situations, it is crucial to safeguard a company’s data from being utilized by competitors for commercial purposes. In these cases, a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license can be applied to the data, indicating that it is exclusively intended for non-commercial use. This license specifies that the data can be shared, modified, and distributed freely, as long as it is not utilized for commercial gain. By using this license, a company can protect its data from being exploited by competitors while still allowing for the data to be shared for research, educational, and other non-commercial purposes.
The possibilities that open data can create are endless. In order to help it fuel economic growth, innovation and general wellbeing, we need to make sure that all data that can be available, should be available.
Ott Velsberg
Estonian Government Chief Data Officer
