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Open Government Data Licensing Framework

  • Conference paper
Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective (EGOVIS 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9265))

Abstract

The purpose is to analyze the licensing of Open Government Data (OGD). The problem is that different regimes of regulation of OGD in Europe create extra barriers for re-using OGD. The survey investigated OGD portals around the world and found out which different regulation regimes are applied on datasets and what the most popular licenses are. Compatibility of the leading licenses and legal notices and case analysis of Italy, Lithuania and UK is presented. This paper is organized: (1) definitions, principles and methodology; (2) results of a survey of the licensing of OGD; (3) analysis of the licenses; (4) case analysis; (5) conclusions and future work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Table 1 must be read from in this manner: licenses in horizontal line meet licenses in a vertical line, and the result represents conclusion of the requirements of two licenses in a mash-up scenario.

  2. 2.

    Table 2 must be read from in this manner: licenses in horizontal line meet licenses in a vertical line, and the result represents conclusion of the requirements of two licenses in a mash-up scenario. Conclusions about mashup possibility is dedicated to the licenses in a horizontal line.

  3. 3.

    E.g. In U.S. gov portal there are 350 datasets covered by legal note which provide conditions of re-use: “The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources makes no representation or warranties, express or implied, with respect to the reuse of data provided herewith, regardless of its format or the means of its transmission. There is no guarantee or representation to the user as to the accuracy, currency, suitability, or reliability of this data for any purpose. The user accepts the data 'as is', and assumes all risks associated with its use. By accepting this data, the user agrees not to transmit this data or provide access to it or any part of it to another party unless the user shall include with the data a copy of this disclaimer. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources assumes no responsibility for actual or consequential damage incurred as a result of any user's reliance on this data.”.

  4. 4.

    http://www.dati.gov.it/content/infografica data related to February 2015.

  5. 5.

    http://www.garanteprivacy.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb/3134436.

  6. 6.

    http://www.dati.gov.it/content/ckan-datigovit.

  7. 7.

    E.g. JC Decaux, Open data, https://developer.jcdecaux.com/#/opendata/vls?page=static, last accessed 15.12.2014 (2013).

  8. 8.

    E.g. “Transparency International” Lithuanian branch, Open data of mass media owners, http://stirna.info/pages/apie, last accessed 15.12.2014 (2013).

  9. 9.

    E.g. Zimnickas, Zemlys, Kilikevičius, Open dataset of Lithuanian Parliament 2012 election results, https://www.google.com/fusiontables/data?docid=1vOawBGzp_0c-8jiKTyY5sJ8MjiWM8sBlbYoAo6s#rows:id=1 last accessed 15.12.2014 (2012).

References

  1. Open Data Research Network, Mapping existing open data research. http://www.opendataresearch.org/news/2015/mapping-existing-open-data-research

  2. The Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Definition. http://opendefinition.org/od/index.html

  3. Berners-Lee, T.: Linked data-design issues. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

  4. Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 November 2003 on the re-use of public sector information (2003)

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  5. Obama, B.: Executive order on Making open and machine readable the new default for government information (2013)

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  6. Creative Commons. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

  7. Mockus, M.: Open Government Data Licenses Framework for a Mashup Model. Jusletter IT, 20 February 2014

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  8. The Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Data handbook. http://opendatahandbook.org/en/what-is-open-data/

  9. The Open Knowledge Foundation: What is Open Government Data. http://opengovernmentdata.org/

  10. ENGAGE project. http://www.engagedata.eu

  11. Palmirani, M., Martoni, M., Girardi, D.: Open government data beyond transparency. In: Kö, A., Francesconi, E. (eds.) EGOVIS 2014. LNCS, vol. 8650, pp. 275–291. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)

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  12. Governatori, G., Lam, H.-P., Rotolo, A., Villata, S., Atemezing, G.A., Gandon, F.: LIVE: a Tool for Checking Licenses Compatibility between Vocabularies and Data. In: International Semantic Web Conference (Posters & Demos), pp. 77−80 (2014)

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  13. UK Copyright Service: UK Copyright Law. http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p01_uk_copyright_law

  14. The National Archives: UK Government licensing framework (2014). http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/uk-government-licensing-framework.pdf

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Acknowledgements

This research is funded by the ERASMUS MUNDUS program LAST-JD, Law, Science and Technology coordinated by University of Bologna.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CIRSFID, University of Bologna, Via Galliera 3, 40121, Bologna, Italy

    Martynas Mockus & Monica Palmirani

Authors
  1. Martynas Mockus
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  2. Monica Palmirani
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Monica Palmirani .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

    Andrea Kő

  2. Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques, Florence, Italy

    Enrico Francesconi

Appendices

Annex A - Definitions

In this paper the term Open Government Data is used for identifying the complex phenomena where the data coming from the government and related bodies (the federal or the state public administration, the region administration, the municipalities, the state enterprises, the police and etc.) are published in open format and with a license in favor of the reuse. In some cases the OGD datasets can include also the copyright works belonging to the private or the public sector.

In the European Union the OGD is coming from the PSI directive 2003/98/EC (updated in 2013, 2013/37/EU) which is known as a re-use of public sector information (PSI) concept implementation. The OGD can be understood as PSI ready for re-use according to the Directive (Art.2 Para4.: “‘re-use’ means the use by persons or legal entities of documents held by public sector bodies, for commercial or noncommercial purposes other than the initial purpose within the public task for which the documents were produced” [4]). In the US the OGD is coming from the President Obama’s initiative [5] and known as Open Data for improving participation, transparency and cooperation between citizens and public administrations.

The OGD is as a part of the OD. The other parts of the OD can be identified as the OD coming from private business sector,Footnote 7 NGO’sFootnote 8 and private citizens initiativesFootnote 9.

What is an open licence is analyzed by The Open Knowledge Foundation. One of the conditions of the open license is propagation: the rights attached to the work must apply to all to whom it is redistributed without the need to agree to any additional legal terms [2].

The EU legal notice is not a license, but has some attributes of the license, e.g. sets requirements of re-use the data. The requirements are explained in the Commission decision of 12 December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents 2011/833/EU Article 6 Sect. 2. All requirements satisfy the propagation criteria except one: the obligation not to distort the original meaning or message of the documents. This obligation asks to agree an additional legal terms and is a place of wide interpretation in a datasets mash-up scenario. On other hand, 18 July 2015 is the date when Directive 2013/37/EU should be implemented. It supports the open license (recital N. 26) and hopefully irrelevant requirement from the Commission decision 2011/833/EU will be removed.

In the paper the Creative Commons (CC) [6] licenses are widely used. CC0 is a license dedicated to public domain. CC-By allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited. CC-SA is a license which has the least restrictions to re-use the original creation. There are different versions of CC-SA and localizations adapted to each country law and language. Further information concerning definitions of the CC licenses family are available in the creative common web site and in a previous work [7].

Annex B – Web Site Analyzed for the Survey

Argentina (http://datospublicos.gob.ar), Australia (http://data.gov.au/dataset), Austria (https://www.data.gv.at/katalog/), Belgium (http://data.belgium.be), Brazil (http://dados.gov.br), Canada (http://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset), Chile (http://datos.gob.cl/datasets), Costa Rica (http://datosabiertos.gob.go.cr/home/), EU (https://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/), France (https://www.data.gouv.fr/en/), Germany (https://www.govdata.de), Greece (http://data.gov.gr), Italy (http://www.dati.gov.it/catalog/dataset), Moldova (http://date.gov.md/en/terms-and-conditions), New Zealand (https://data.govt.nz/catalog/), Norway (http://data.norge.no/), Portugal (http://www.dados.gov.pt), Spain (http://datos.gob.es/catalogo#), The Netherlands (https://data.overheid.nl/data/search), UK (http://data.gov.uk/data/search), Uruguay (https://catalogodatos.gub.uy/dataset), US (http://catalog.data.gov/dataset).

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Mockus, M., Palmirani, M. (2015). Open Government Data Licensing Framework. In: Kő, A., Francesconi, E. (eds) Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective. EGOVIS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9265. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22389-6_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22389-6_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22388-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22389-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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