Open Data in Iceland
September 12th, 2008
Hjalmar Gislason recently wrote to us to tell us about an initiative to open up material from the Icelandic government and other public institutions. In The Case for Open Access to Public Sector Data he writes:
In these public data collections lies tremendous value. The data that has been collected for taxpayers’ money for decades or in a few cases even centuries (like population statistics) is a treasure trove of economical and social value. Yet, the state of public data is such that only a fraction of this value is being realized.
The reason is that accessing this data is often very hard. First of all its often hard to even find out what exists, as the sources are scattered, there is no central registry for existing data sets and many agencies don’t even publish information on the data that they have.
More worrying is that access to these data sets is made difficult by a number of restrictions, some accidental, other due to lack of funding to make them more accessible and some of these restrictions are even deliberate. These restrictions include license fees, proprietary or inadequate formats and unjustified legal complications.
I’d like to argue that any data gathered by a government organization should be made openly accessible online. Open access, means absence of all legal, technical and discriminating restrictions on the use or redistribution of data. A formal definition of Open Access can be found at opendefinition.org
Hjalmar has also started a wiki page, Opin gögn (’open data’), so that people can register government data and document how it is accessible, how it is published, and so on.
We look forward to watching this progress!
Related posts:
- Iceland: from the financial crisis to open data The following guest post is from Hjalmar
- Good news for open data: Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data, Open Data Commons PDDL and CCZero Last night Science Commons announced the
- CKAN and Finding Open Data in the Life Sciences Melanie Dulong de Rosnay recently publis
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September 13th, 2008 at 10:10 am
[...] Open Data in Iceland Published September 13, 2008 Uncategorized Tags: open access The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) blog featured a story about the effort to openly make available public funded data in Iceland. The story was brought to OKF’s attention by Hjalmar Gislason, who also launched a wikipage, Opin gögn (’open data’), where he tries to pool information about nature and whereabout of public data and documents by inviting people to document these details on the wiki. In these public data collections lies tremendous value. The data that has been collected for taxpayers’ money for decades or in a few cases even centuries (like population statistics) is a treasure trove of economical and social value. Yet, the state of public data is such that only a fraction of this value is being realized. [...]