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Building an open data ecosystem: an Irish experience

Published: 27 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Data.gov celebrated its fifth birthday in May 2014. Data.gov.uk will turn five in January 2015. According to datacatalogs.org, there are more than 380 Open Data portals around the world, with new portals still appearing all the time. Some Open Data practitioners cried 'go ugly, go early', others 'raw data now', while others lobbied for CSV and RDF. With Open Data initiatives maturing, what can countries such as Ireland, who are embarking on their national Open Data journey, learn from the experience of these instigators? What are best practices for selecting datasets, publishing data and supporting data reuse? In this paper, I present the experience of defining an Irish Open Data strategy, based on an ecosystem structure incorporating not only technical, but social, political, economic and legislative aspects. Each element of the ecosystem represents a key component of a sustainable Open Data initiative. Through an extensive literature review of international best practice and liaising with stakeholders, the ecosystem elements evolved, along with common principles and challenges. Finally, the outcome of this study is a concrete roadmap to progress the vision of Open Data in Ireland.

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T. Davies, "Open Data: Infrastructures and ecosystems," Open Data Research, 2011.
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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      ICEGOV '14: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
      October 2014
      563 pages
      ISBN:9781605586113
      DOI:10.1145/2691195
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      • Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Govt: Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Government
      • Municipio de Guimarães: Municipio de Guimarães

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 27 October 2014

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      Author Tags

      1. best practices
      2. ecosystem
      3. open data
      4. roadmap
      5. strategy
      6. sustainability

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      • Research-article

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      • Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)

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      ICEGOV2014
      Sponsor:
      • Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Govt
      • Municipio de Guimarães

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      ICEGOV '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 73 submissions, 41%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%

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      • (2024)The unresolved need for dependable guarantees on security, sovereignty, and trust in data ecosystemsData & Knowledge Engineering10.1016/j.datak.2024.102301151:COnline publication date: 1-May-2024
      • (2024)The Needs, Wants, and Wishes of the Open Government Data Idea – The Emergence of a New UnderstandingElectronic Government10.1007/978-3-031-70274-7_21(337-353)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2024
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      • (2023)Classification of Open Government Data Solutions’ Help: A Novel Taxonomy and Cluster AnalysisElectronic Government10.1007/978-3-031-41138-0_15(230-245)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2023
      • (2023)Concept for an Open Data Ecosystem to Build a Powerful Data EnvironmentInformation Systems10.1007/978-3-031-30694-5_19(251-263)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2023
      • (2023) Analysis of UK Science Data Ethics Policy: Structure, Content and Governance Network Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.96660:1(1125-1127)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
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