Hello! Did you know that every time you check an online weather forecast, use your smartphone’s GPS to find an all-night drugstore, or calculate how much your city paid for road repairs, you are using Open Data.
Open data is more than just a fad, it's becoming a potentially practical tool for everyone.
In this week’s infosphere digest, learn more about how open data is changing the world and its scope and influence in today’s world.
So, let’s get started!
❓What is Open Data?
Open data is data that can be freely used, re-used, and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.
Open data are the building blocks of open knowledge. Open knowledge is what open data becomes when it’s useful, usable, and used.
A vast amount of this data is collected during the course of normal government activities, including service delivery, research or administration.
Open data becomes usable when made available in a common, machine-readable format.
Open data must be licensed. Its license must permit people to use the data in any way they want, including transforming, combining, and sharing it with others, even commercially.
Case Study - Louisville is among the worst cities for those with asthma. The AIR Louisville project is trying to change that by bringing together health management company, Propeller Health, the Institute for Healthy Air, Water and Soil and the City of Louisville’s public health department. The solution is a smart inhaler that tracks when, where and how often residents of Louisville experience asthma symptoms. Combined with real-time traffic and weather data, this information can help doctors and public officials track down problem areas and trigger points, and start to take steps to improve air quality in identified areas.
📝 Types Of Open Data
🌈 Impact/Benefits Of Open Data
Open data is playing an increasingly important role in solving big public problems, primarily by allowing citizens and policymakers access to new forms of data-driven assessment of the problems at hand. It also enables data-driven engagement producing more targeted interventions and enhanced collaboration.
There are many efficiency gains from open data, such as potential lives saved, time saved, environmental benefits, and improvement of language services, as well as associated potential costs savings.
Open Data can help streamline government services, stimulate economic opportunities, encourage innovation, improve public safety and reduce poverty.
Freely available data from governments is an important national resource, serving as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and other public benefits.
Companies can rely on open data to exploit gaps across markets and identify business opportunities such as finding a market niche to focus on.
According to a recent report, open data can generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value in key sectors of the global economy, including education, health, transportation, and electricity.
In Europe, the open data market size was €184.45 billion in 2019 and is estimated to go up to €199.51 - €334.20 billion in 2025.
In Europe, there were 1.09 million employees in the open data sector in 2019 and it is forecasted to go up to 1.12 – 1.97 million employees by 2025.
In a 2014 a report by Nicholas Gruen of Lateral Economics, valued Australian government open data at $25 billion per annum (of the combined direct and indirect values).
As the benefits of Open Data impact broader populations and additional useful options are discovered, governments and institutions worldwide are eager to launch new or expand existing Open Data programs.
📈History Of Open Data
The term open data appeared for the first time in 1995, in a document from an American scientific agency. It dealt with the disclosure of geophysical and environmental data and promoted a complete and open exchange of scientific information between different countries, a prerequisite for the analysis and understanding of these global phenomena.
In December 2007, 30 open-data pioneers gathered in Sebastopol, Calif., and penned a set of eight open-government data principles that inaugurated a new era of democratic innovation and economic opportunity.
In the years since those principles were released, governments around the world have adopted open-data initiatives and launched platforms that empower researchers, journalists, and entrepreneurs to mine this new raw material and its potential to uncover new discoveries and opportunities.
Open data has drawn civic hacker enthusiasts around the world, fueling hackathons, challenges, apps contests, bar-camps and "datapaloozas" focused on issues as varied as health, energy, finance, transportation, and municipal innovation.
Today, more than 250 governments at national, sub-national and city levels; almost 50 developed and developing countries; and entities such as the World Bank and United Nations have launched Open Data initiatives—and more are launched every year.
⚡Privacy Risks of Open Data
There is a tension between utility and anonymity: data can often be either useful or anonymous, but rarely both. Therefore, since people expect open data to be useful, there are many privacy risks.
First, when combined with other datasets, anonymous data can be re-identified.
Second, personal data can be directly released in “anonymized” datasets, though often accidentally.
Finally, third parties can use their own data to re-identify anonymous open data.
Re-identification occurs when individuals are identified from information gleaned form a supposedly anonymized data set. Re-identification is successful when a hacker is able to find hidden PII in a data set, or when two, or more data sets are combined together to identify people. This involves the use of anonymous data sets with non-anonymous data sets (for example, public voter lists) to re-identify individuals present in the anonymous data.
Citizens’ awareness and agreement to the government’s use of their data are therefore key. Belgium, Estonia and Spain are good role models, where each person can access their own online “citizen folder” to see if their data is being consulted or reused, and for what purpose.
📉Other Drawbacks Of Open Data
If you free your data you lose control over other conclusions that may be taken from your data and for which users gave consent. Hence, a major concern is the intentions of the people asking for the data – a pharma company that finds no link of their product to cancer when re-analyzing data, tobacco companies that re-analyze raw data and get new favorable results, or the Kuklux klan asking for any random data sets with race identifiers so they find a results in their interest.
The Competence of the people re-analyzing data is another issue. In the information age, real expertise is losing value, anyone with a blog who calls themselves a Dr (outside academia) can ‘reanalyze’ data and find any conclusion they want .
Noise, political motivated disinformation, propaganda, commercial interests can easily be amplified with open data.
Open Data is more likely to increase the digital divide and social inequality than reduce it, since declaring data sets to be open does not, in itself, make it of any practical use to the public. It is only open to a small elite of technical specialists who know how to interpret and use it, as well as to those that can afford to employ them. There is a real danger of adding a new “data divide” on top of existing digital and economic divides.
📰 Open Data Barometer
The Open Data Barometer is a global measure of how governments are publishing and using open data for accountability, innovation and social impact.
It looks specifically at 30 governments that have made concrete commitments to champion open data, either by adopting the Open Data Charter, or, as members of the G20, by signing up to the G20 Anti-Corruption Open Data Principles.
The 30 governments have been divided into three groups, based on their performance:
Champions - Governments with the highest total scores — all above 65 — and with a balance between scores on the sub-indexes of open data readiness, implementation, and impact.
Contenders - Governments in the second group have not yet passed the 65-point threshold and remain significantly behind the first group.
Stragglers - Governments that appear to have stagnated, making little to no progress at all in five years.
The table below shows a comparison of the scores of the top 3 countries in each group:
Table: Open Data Barometer scores for the top 3 countries in each category. Source: The Open Data Barometer by The World Wide Web Foundation.
Fig 1: A comparison of the open data barometer scores of the top 3 countries in each category.
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A list of different measures that have been adopted by companies to measure and analyze Impact finance.
A list of major breakthroughs or inventions in the last 100 years.
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