Resource information
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.
The paper at hand discusses the aforementioned concepts, with the purpose of providing the elements needed to understand the state of the art of open data (as an approach to government, a field of research and a movement). From the legal point of view, the focus in on the European and Italian jurisdictions. From
the technical point of view, the “linked data” formalism is discussed in some details.
The last part of the paper analyses the case of open data concerning government real estate in Italy. Such example is relevant since it is at the border between the open data and transparency domains; moreover, the presence of geographical references (at minimum, the address) provides a key to cross these data with other datasets. An analysis of the current publication practices in this domain is also functional to
showing the limitations of a publication duty which is not accompanied by the necessary degree of coordination and by detailed technical guidelines.
