Open Government Data. Notes for a State of the Art 2016 and Focus on Italian Government Real Estate Data
Public Administrations (PA) collect data. They do that to function and for accountability purposes.
The digital revolution implies that the cost of making these data available for reuse is negligible, while it increases the opportunity cost of limiting their use to the purpose for which they were originally collected.
The law encourages such reuse, and there is a growing number of technical standards and good practices making that easier and sustainable. In short, nowadays, the publication of open data is a good practice, but also a duty for PAs.