Blog by Fernando Monge: “Valuable datasets remain buried or locked in formats and systems that render them unusable, so making this data legible is a direct way to create value. Just mapping the invisible city – the hundreds of miles of covered cables, pipes, and infrastructure laying beneath the urban surface – can save millions of dollars. The UK government estimates that its National Underground Asset Register could generate more than £400 million in economic benefits each year by reducing accidental strikes on underground infrastructure.
But making this data usable is expensive. Some governments lack the resources to clean, process and prepare this data for dissemination. If they have to publish it openly and cannot recover the costs, this work can appear as another unfunded item in an already tight budget. An item that never makes it into the priority list, so rich data remains locked in closed systems, when not in physical archives.
This is the issue that the UK’s proposal on charging for certain public-sector data reuse is trying to tackle.
And it’s not merely a technical issue. Decisions on how to fund open data have deep implications on who pays, who benefits, and what are the terms of access to a critical infrastructure on top of which thousands of products and services – public and private – are built…(More)”.
