This book discusses the latest developments in the field of open data. The opening of data by public organizations has the potential to improve the public sector, inspire business innovation, and establish transparency. With this potential comes unique challenges; these developments impact the operation of governments as well as their relationship with private sector enterprises and society. Changes at the technical, organizational, managerial, and political level are taking place, which, in turn, impact policy-making and traditional institutional structures. This book contributes to the systematic analysis and publication of cutting-edge methods, tools, and approaches for more efficient data sharing policies, practices, and further research. Topics discussed include an introduction to open data, the open data landscape, the open data life cycle, open data policies, organizational issues, interoperability, infrastructure, business models, open data portal evaluation, and research directions, best practices, and guidelines. Written to address different perspectives, this book will be of equal interest to students and researchers, ICT industry staff, practitioners, policy makers and public servants. ... Read more

The minitrack "Big, Open and Linked Data (BOLD) in Government" aims at advancing our knowledge in this field. Open, big and linked data is a thrilling research field as more and more structured and unstructured sources are combined to create smart applications. Data governance will likely become more important in which redundant data and wrong data is reduced and data can be reused for various purposes. ... Read more

There is a lack of research concerning the factors influencing the success or failure of open data initiatives. Based on the results of two workshops, we provide a list of 47 success factors for open data publication and 18 success factors for open data use. We further use three case studies (ENGAGE, Open NY, and Open Vienna) to examine how the criticality of factors varies depending on the geographical level and other characteristics of the open data initiative. The cases, representing open data initiatives at city, regional, and transnational levels, point at different categories of critical success factors. Our key conclusions are that 1) the criticality of the factors depends considerably on the context of the open data initiative; 2) a number of success factors appear to be more universally applicable than others; 3) the factors that are critical to all three cases are derived from many different success factor categories, which suggests that open data initiatives should adopt an interdisciplinary approach, and 4) further work is needed to detail the success factors for open data publication and use in other contexts. ... Read more

One essential element of open data ecosystems concerns their development through feedback loops, discussions and dynamic supplier and user interactions. However, these elements appear barely to be part of existing open data practices. We conducted a survey which showed that most professional open data users did not know at least one open data infrastructure that enabled five specific types of discussion and feedback mechanisms. The survey showed that much can still be done to improve feedback and discussion on open data infrastructures. In this paper we discuss an open data infrastructure which has started to contribute to filling this gap. The discussed ENGAGE open data infrastructure combines functionalities to close the feedback loop and to return information to public authorities for better open data use and publication as well as establishing communication channels between stakeholders. This may effectively lead to the stimulation and facilitation of value generation from open data. ... Read more