**5. Open government data barriers, challenges, and risks**

## **5.1 Barriers and challenges**

Open government data faces a number of barriers and challenges that may impede its development and implementation. Some of these barriers are related to either the data providers or the data users, while other barriers can be attributed to both sides. Barriers that might face either side are outlined below:


There are some other barriers that are encountered by both open data publishers and users. These include the following:


Challenges at the institutional level include the avoiding culture of governments whereby governments are reluctant to open public data, the time consuming procedure to access and reuse data, and the fact that governments do not take users' ideas into consideration in government administration. On the other hand, challenges at the users' level include lacking of advance search facilities, lacking of helpdesk facilities for the users, and lacking of expertise to analyze data on the part of the users [39].

There are some challenging factors which discourage institutions and governmental bodies to join an open government data initiative. These factors include, but are not limited to the following:

