**1. Introduction**

The concept of Open Government Data (OGD) has been heavily debated during the last few years. It has drawn much interest and attention among researchers and government officials worldwide. Many of the developed and developing countries have launched open data initiatives with a view to harnessing the benefits and advantages of open government data. This chapter is dedicated to highlighting the various aspects of open data and open government data.

According to the Open Definition, "Open" in the context of data and content "means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose". There are many types of data that can be open and used or re-used by the public. These include data relating to culture, science and research, finance, statistics, weather, and environment [1, 2].

The Open Knowledge Foundation outlined key features of openness as the following:


• Universal participation: the data should be available for everyone to use, reuse and redistribute without discrimination against fields of knowledge, or against persons or groups [2].

Features of open data also include the following aspects: Data should be primary and timely and accessed data must be available in non-proprietary formats and free to use with unrestricted license. Data should also be as accurate as possible. Although most of the data will not meet all of these criteria, data is only truly open if it meets most of them [3].

The earliest appearance for the term open data was in 1995. It was related to the disclosure of geographical and environmental data in a document written by an American agency. The scholarly community understood the benefits of open and shareable data long before the term open data was a technical object or political movement [4].

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) defined open data from a research perspective as: "Open Data is research data that is freely available on the internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyze, reprocess, pass to software or use for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself" [5]. SPARC stressed the benefits of open data in that it accelerates the pace of discovery, grows the economy, helps ensure people do not miss breakthroughs, and improves the integrity of the scientific and scholarly record,

The current concept of open data and particularly open government data (OGD) started to become visible and popular in 2009 with a number of governments in the developed world who announced new initiatives to open up their public information records such as the USA, UK, and New Zealand. These initiatives were triggered by the mandate for transparency and open government from the then American President Barack Obama administration, thus kick starting the Open Government Data Movement [6, 7].

To legalize the use of the published public data, open data must be licensed. This license should permit people to freely use, transform, redistribute and republish the data even on a commercial basis. A number of standard licenses designed to provide consistent and broadly recognized terms of use are employed. These licenses include: Creative Commons (CC), Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL), and Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL). Some governmental organizations and international organizations have released their own tailored Open Data license such as The Worldbank Data License, French open Data License, and UK Gov. Data License. Standard licenses have many advantages over bespoke licenses, including greater recognition among users, increased interoperability, and greater ease of compliance [8, 9].

### **2. Development of the open government data concept**

Open government data (OGD) is government-related data that is made open to the public. Government data usually contain various datasets, such as budget and finance, population, census, geographical data, parliament minutes, etc. It also includes data collected by public organizations or agencies such as data related to climate or pollution, public transportation, traffic, child care or education [10].

Open government data has been associated with Open Government which is perceived as a phenomenon encompassing a number of characteristics and dimensions such as information availability, transparency, participation, collaboration, and information technologies [11]. The concept of open government data can be

#### *Open Government Data: Development, Practice, and Challenges DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100465*

traced back to the year 1966 when the USA federal government passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The coming of the internet and new information and telecommunications technologies contributed to the more recent interest and understanding of the value and benefits of government information for the sake of transparency, collaboration and innovation [12]. Two significant consequent developments contributed positively to the open government data; these are the launching of data.gov in the USA in May 2009 and the data.gov.uk in the United Kingdom (UK), in January 2010. It subsequently spread out to many other countries around the world, as well as to international organizations, including the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Moreover, the concurrent advances in the information and telecommunications technologies also played a role in the development of open government data, coupled with the passing of open standard laws by many countries such as Canada, the USA, Germany and New Zealand, and the setting of policies on open data focusing on indexing government data holdings [13, 14].

In 2015 a number of governments, civil society members, and international experts convened with the purpose of representing an internationally-agreed set of norms for how to publish government and other public sector organizations data. They then formulated a set of principles called the Open Data Charter. They introduced these principles with the following statement:

"We, the adherents to the International Open Data Charter, recognize that governments and other public sector organizations hold vast amounts of data that may be of interest to citizens, and that this data is an underused resource. Opening up government data can encourage the building of more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation, justice, transparency, and prosperity to flourish, all while ensuring civic participation in public decisions and accountability for governments…" [15].

The conveners agreed to adhere to the following set of principles concerning access and release of government and public sector data. That data should be.

i.Open by Default;

ii.Timely and Comprehensive;

iii.Accessible and Usable;

iv.Comparable and Interoperable;

v.For Improved Governance and Citizen Engagement;

vi.For Inclusive Development and Innovation [15].

The scope of Open government data which is made available with no restrictions on its use, reuse, or distribution covers all data funded by public money excluding private, security sensitive, and confidential data.

#### **3. Open government data practice**

The Open Data Barometer, an international benchmark of how open data publishing is used by governments for accountability, innovation and social impact ranked, in 2018, 30 leading world countries, excluding the EU countries, according to their performance and commitment to the principles of open data

movement. It measured the progress these 30 governments have made against three essential ingredients for good open data governance, defined as part of the Open Data Charter updates process, namely Open by Default, Data Infrastructure, and Publishing with Purpose**.** In other words, the Barometer ranked governments according to three criteria: readiness for open data initiatives, implementation of open data programs and impact that open data is having on business, politics, and civil society. The top ten ranking countries were Canada, UK, Australia, France, South Korea, Mexico, Japan, New Zealand, USA, and Germany, respectively [16]. On the other hand, the open data maturity assessment reported on data maturity in European countries for the year 2020. It provided insight into the developments in the open data field in European countries, including the 27 EU Member States, and the participating European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, including the Eastern Partnership countries Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, besides the United Kingdom. The assessment measured open data maturity with regard to four dimensions: policy, impact, portal, and quality. Maturity was scored against these dimensions, forming an overall score of open data maturity for each country. The countries were clustered into four groups, from the most mature to the least. Seven countries are labeled as trend setters according to their performance. They are Denmark, Spain, France, Ireland, Estonia, Poland, and Austria [17].

Public institutions are among the largest creators and collectors of data in many different fields or categories. These data categories include areas such as transportation, traffic, finance, environment, economy, government, weather, geographical information, tourist information, statistics, business, public sector budgeting, performance levels, and science and technology. Data about policies and inspection in fields such as education quality, safety, food… etc. is also included. In addition to this, international OGD sites have a specific characteristics and data patterns in terms of their OGD levels, data formats, and datasets. Top data formats used are CSV, PDF, RDF JSON, and XML. **Table 1** provides the definitions and examples of these file types. However, there are clear variations among world regions in terms of the number of data formats, datasets, and data categories [7, 23].

Boosting democratic control and political participation, fostering service and product innovation, and enhancing law enforcement are three primary motivations to publishing government data**.** In comparing the open data strategies of five countries, namely Australia, Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, It was found that the focus of the strategic plans differs. For example, the United States government focused on transparency for the purpose of increasing public engagement, Denmark emphasized the potentials that open data offers for the introduction of new products and services, whereas the United Kingdom focused on the use of open data for strengthening law enforcement [24].

Citizens use four types of OGD applications in order to engage with their governments for the purpose of open government. The first type of application focuses on using access to government information to weed out corruption in government. The second type of application focuses on the direct benefit to the public of access to legal materials, such as access to the law itself. The third application is related to informing policy decisions whereby information helps citizens to better understand their own communities. The fourth type of application is related to consumer products where applications are products that bring open government to a wide consumer audience [14]. Open Government Data can lead to a more effective and efficient government particularly regarding its relation with citizens. This can be achieved by increasing transparency and accountability, developing trust, credibility and reputation, promoting progress and innovation, encouraging public education and community engagement, and storing and preserving information



#### **Table 1.**

*File types definitions and examples [18–22].*

over time [25]. Therefore, open data can lead to open government which is defined as: "….. a multilateral, political, and social process, which includes in particular transparent, collaborative, and participatory action by government and administration. To meet these conditions, citizens and social groups should be integrated into political processes with the support of modern information and communication technologies, which together should improve the effectiveness and efficiency of governmental and administrative action" [26].

#### **3.1 Portals and the publication of OGD**

According to the principles of OGD, data must be: complete, primary, timely, accessible, and machine-readable. It should also be non-discriminatory, nonproprietary and License-free. Furthermore, public institutions should publish all data they have if it would not violate security, privacy or other legitimate restrictions [27].

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) outlined three steps for publishing open data, which will help the public to easily find, use, cite and understand the data:

Step 1: Publishing the data in its raw form. The data should be well-structured to enable its use in an automated manner by the users of the data. Data may be in XML, RDF or CSV formats. Formats used should allow the data to be seen as well as extracted by the users.

Step2: Creating an online catalog of the raw data, complete with documentation, to enable users to discover published data.

Step 3: Making the data human readable as well as machine-readable [28].

Open data portals are a very important component of open data infrastructure. They connect data publishers with data users enabling the former to deliver open data and establish the necessary relationships for increasing transparency. Open data portals, which are essentially data management software, contain metadata about datasets so that these datasets could be accessed and utilized by the users. The open data portal includes the tools which help the users to find and harvest all relevant data from public sector databases. From the users' perspective, features of open data portals can be used to specify datasets they need and to request for datasets [29]. Thus, Open data portals play the role of interface between government data and citizens who use or reuse this data. Consequently, a portal should have user- friendly features such as a clean look with a search facility. The portal should also provide information about the responsible authority which hosts the portal written clearly and in a simple language. The portal's contents should be organized into categories and subcategories. It should also aim to engage citizens' ideas and feedback in addition to its basic function of making data available to stakeholders. Data quality and standards, and the language settings are very important elements in portals so that they can satisfy their users' needs [30].

The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) benchmark for publishing open government data and the World Bank's technical option guide outlined the necessary technical requirements for establishing efficient and modern OGD data centers. These requirements include, among other things, that:


As for OGD portals' content and functionality requirements, these include the following:


There are a number of additional requirements that contribute to making portals achieve sustainability, meet user needs and have an added value impact. These requirements are the following:


A number of open source and commercial open data portals software exist. Some of the more widely used open source software are the following:

i.CKAN: This is an open source data portal designed to allow publishing, sharing and managing datasets; it has a number of functionalities to the managers and end-users such as full-text search, reporting tools, and multi-lingual support. It also provides an Application Programming Interface (API) to access the data.

