Developing and implementing a strategy on open data that coordinates the efforts of multiple agencies.

Datasets that are fit for publication as Open Data need to be identified as well as the requirements of both the internal and external stakeholders. Open Data publication plan should be developed taking into account needs of the relevant stakeholders as well as the potential benefits, risks and costs of publication of the datasets.

A number of stakeholders have legitimate interests in what is done with information and they might also have legal rights to confidentiality or privacy. Bodies collecting or holding public sector information must respect these rights and should conform to the interests and wishes of the relevant stakeholders. Therefore bodies collecting or holding public sector information must maintain records of concerned stakeholders and their rights in the information and their wishes regarding it.

Using a variety of metrics at different levels of the organisation to assess the value and impact of sharing PSI.

Encourage crowdsourcing around PSI

Establishing and Managing a National Public Actors Network on Open Data to cooperate on common problems and challenges

Research data need to open at national level. Citizens should have access to research results and achievements produced at national level. In addition, researchers should be informed about what other researchers are doing in the country.

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a growing movement for organizations to make their existing data available in a machine-readable format. There are two equally important viewpoints to LOD: publishing and consuming. Government open data policies should include both sub-processes of this important aspect, especially focusing on the publication process

The Spanish National Catalogue datos.gob.es has developed A federation tool for open data portals that enables automatic publication of the metadata corresponding to the data sets published on the websites of each public entity. A global index of reusable public information is thus created and can be accessed by companies or any user to locate reusable data in datos.gob.es without the need to know and find the website of the public entity holding the data in which re-users are interested in.

Open Data Albania (ODA, http://open.data.al/en) is an ongoing project implemented by the Albanian Institute of Science (AIS), a non-profit, nonpartisan organization established in 2011 Albania. The mission of AIS is to promote research activities that offer solutions to socio-economic problems, increase transparency and strengthen civic engagement. Since its beginning and continuing in the present year, the institute has successfully executed Open Data Albania as its most prominent project on transparency through Open Data usability in the country. One of the criteria for Open Data Albania success was the active involvement of journalists in the process of opening up data.

Local transport companies generate information about the services they provide –i.e., timetables, service disruptions, stops, accessibility, even rich real-time data. Although the transport service may be run by a private company, that information is a relevant asset to be spread as Open Data. All parts will benefit: citizens will have a better user experience; the municipality will promote the use of collective transport; and the company will provide a better service without additional costs.

While certainly data markets have existed long before the advent of the internet, the wholesale exchange of large structured dataset is relatively new. Recent studies identify data marketplaces and data enrichment as important business models utilizing open data. Many early entrants have been forced to shift their focus from "statistics on speed" (timetrics) to more cautious approaches or they left the market altogether

The Spanish companies that create applications, products or value added services for third parties, from public sector information are studied periodically to better know their necessities in order to adapt the public sector information offer. Hereinafter we will call this set of companies: the infomediary sector.

Geodata is a broad term that refers to data that has a spatial component, defined through various methods, such as pairs of coordinates, name of location, address identifiers etc. Its usage is wide spread over various domains, such as: natural resources, government, mapping, health services, transportation, communications and utilities, military, public safety and the list may continue. In the last decades, given the considerable technological and informational progress, the geoinformation private sector has flourished.   There is an immense untapped resource of geospatial information, and that is represented by the databases of national agencies and institutions that have produced and collected data within national monitoring networks and research projects for an extensive period of time. Geodata relevant matters, that need top be addressed, include: quality and relevance, bridging community driven geodata with public geodata, legislation aspects (connection between PSI Directive and INSPIRE Directive, technical issues).   This Best Practice suggests a methodology for organizing open public geodata discussions.

An academic business accelerator is an organisational unit within an university that aims to mobilize and support people to build their own enterprise. Open data can provide a very useful basis for entrepreneurship, allowing for development of added value services by citizens and small enterprises.

The introduction of new directives may happen much faster if there is some kind of bonus or benefit promised when implementing it.

A federation tool for open data portals enabling automatic publication of the metadata corresponding to the data sets published on the websites of each public entity. A global index of reusable public information should be created and must be accessed by companies or any user to locate reusable data in datos.gob.es without the need to know and find the website of the public entity holding the data in which re-users are interested in.

Catalogs and indexes to refer to published information on the web

Citizens Participation to Improve Open Data Portal Productivity and Efficiency

Data Marketplaces While certainly data markets have existed long before the advent of the internet (matching information supply and demand has been driving many media revolutions from newspapers to the telegraph), the wholesale exchange of large structured dataset is relatively new. The Deloitte Study "Market assessment of public sector information" for the UK Department for Business, Information and Skills identifies data marketplaces and data enrichment as important business models utilizing open data. Many early entrants have been forced to shift their focus from "statistics on speed" (timetrics) to more cautious approaches or they left the market altogether

Crowdsourcing of PSI

Linked Data Approach for Publishing Statistical Data

Geospatial technologies play an important role in business, government, and research applications and workflows. However, the benefits of using these technologies are often limited by the inability to effectively share information. To address this problem, government, private sector, and academic organizations use the OGC consensus process to cooperatively define, develop, test, document, validate and approve interface and encoding standards and best practices that solve interoperability problems.

OpenMove is an open platform for mobile ticketing: free and available for bus, train, subway and parking, it features app for users, backoffice and APIs for Public Administration and tools for ticket inspection.

Different publication formats for both human readers or for machine processing

Best practices for identifying high value datasets.

Publishing PSI for re-use at no charge unlocks maximum commercial and non-commercial potential.

The majority of Open Data publishing and consumption processes target humans. Human readership and machine processing are both important but require different publication formats. The form in which data is published varies: dashboards, reports, graphs and charts, textual content on Web pages, etc.

Costs of publication should be minimised unless there are clear benefits.

In order to enable development of the Open Data movement, the public administration needs an infrastructure to connect different bodies among themselves and with the community (private actors, citizens).

Data portals can facilitate the distribution of open data by providing an easy-to-access, searchable hub for multiple data sets.

The goal of the best practice is to enable creation of a common catalogue ( global index) of reusable public information that can be accessed by companies or any user to locate reusable data without the need to know and find the website of the public entity that maintains the data.

As a way of increasing the understanding of the value of open data and sensitivity for data sharing both within and outside of the public sector, traffic light system can be used. The catagories are as follows. Green data Data which obviously has no sensitivity issues can automatically be categorised as green open data. Yellow data   Red data Highly sensitive can at most be shared with the person or organisation the data concerns or under highly restrictive conditions. The traffic light system contributes to shifting the focus to sharing as the rule, rather than the exception. 'Open data' is as a natural consequence of the real goal that is to share data.

Information already published by organisations represent good candidates for datasets to be published in open formats for re-use. However the amount of such information is often too large to be catalogued manually. Therefore automated scraping techniques should be applied to create inventories of already published information.

The goal is to provide efficient and optimal approach for dealing with geo-spatial aspects of data.

The goal of the best practice is to contribute to resolving difficulties when exchanging public datasets that include geospatial data.

Publishing statistical data as Linked Data on the basis of W3C’s Data Cube vocabulary (http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-data-cube/) which specifies an approach for the expression of the data in a standardised machine-readable way as well as identifying a recommended set of metadata terms to describe the datasets.

Several government agencies across Europe have provided guidelines to their public administartion regarding the acquisition of software. Trying to save costs where possible, public administration on country or local level (cities) adopt policies for using open source software and implement various actions to promote the usage of open software within and outside of the public administration.

The establishment of an active open data network, an eco-system to facilitate the uptake of data and information for re-use.

Citizens should have access to research data and information.

Business accelerators are organisational units promoted by universities or public bodies that aims to mobilize and support people to build their own enterprise. Open data can provide a very useful basis for entrepreneurship, allowing for development of added value services by citizens and small enterprises. This accelerators foster the creation of new startups and a subsequent increase of the PSI re-use.

The 'Infomediary Sector' is the market of companies that create applications, products or value added services based on PSI in any . Assessing this market periodically helps to understand better its necessities in order to adapt the public sector information offer as well as promoting PSI re-use, engaging new companies.

One of the success criteria for the Open Data initiatives is the active involvement of potential reusers (industry, developers, designers, artists, journalists, and citizens in general) in the process of opening up data and maintaining an Open Data initiative. This active involvement should be present since the definition of the Open Data and PSI re-use strategy of governments, and during the whole cycle of open data. In this sense, journalism is really important so media should be involved in most of the activities.

Use free and open source, cloud-based Geographic Information (GI) delivery system for public and private sector core-users to enable an easier re-use and dissemination of spatial and non-spatial data.

Crowd sourcing can be an efficient way to increase quality and availability of machine readable data, in particular to help cultural heritage institutions to open up PSI. On a policy level, identifying community crowd-sourced projects outside government institutions can also be an indicator of valuable datasets that should be prioritized for open release.

Location data pours from mobile devices, stationary sensors, airborne imaging systems and modelling applications. The explosion in location data offers great potential. Integration of human, physical, and digital systems operating in the built environment can improve governance, business, resilience and quality of life. Too often, though, location data is locked up in ad hoc and proprietary encodings and interfaces. To address this problem, government, private sector, and academic organizations use the OGC consensus process to cooperatively define, develop, test, document, validate and approve interface and encoding standards and best practices that solve interoperability problems.   Solving these difficult geospatial communication problems requires open standard encodings and interfaces. Governments should prioritise information with spatial components, expressed in open standard formats, in order to enable a wide range of potential reuses.

Business models for Open Data and PSI re-use have emerged in response to the economic opportunities presented by the increasing availability of open data. In order to identify and define a clear and successful business model, a 6-Value (6-V) business model framework has been defined. This 6-Value (6-V) business model framework, created following the Design Science Research (DSR) tradition, can be used as design artefact to facilitate the explication and detailed analysis of existing open data business models in practice.   Based on the results from the analysis, business model patterns and emerging core value disciplines for open data businesses were defined. The existing open data business models help in linking them to the overall business strategy through value disciplines.

The Open Data Lifecycle comprises mainly three actors: data providers, policy decision-makers and the public (citizens and private sector). Data providers should ensure participation and the possibility for feedback from end-users at any time during the publishing process in order to provide better government services.

The goal of this best practice is to improve the quality of government data by enabling feedback channels for users to report errors, inconsistencies, incompleteness in already published data

The goal is to improve the trust in government by enabling quality assessment and/or providing evidence about the quality of the published information (data)

The quality of public data can be one of the barrier for releasing it as open due to fear of community disapproval (e.g. with geodata). Using the power to the people and bridging the public data with community driven data can lead to significant improvement of public open databases.

Companies using the infomediary model to create applications, products or value added services from public sector information for third parties (the infomediary sector) can be used as evaluators of the public datasets.

Creating a federated index of reusable public information through agreement on the metadata to describe datasets.

Establishing a colour code to categorise the openness of data that makes it easier for Public Sector organisations to determine with whom data can be shared.

Publishing statistical data as Linked Data on the basis of W3C’s Data Cube vocabulary (http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-data-cube/) which specifies an approach for the expression of the data in a standardised machine-readable way as well as identifying a recommended set of metadata terms to describe the datasets.

Organisations might find deciding what information resources should be made available for re-use in machine-readable formats challenging. Information already published by organisations represent a good candidate for datasets to be published as open data. Therefore organizations should create and maintain inventory of already published information.

When the user community is asked about what datasets they would prefer for release they often cannot respond because they are not aware of what datasets are available. Therefore an overview of datasets managed by an organisation should be published.

Legislation might place restrictions on what information can be made available for reuse. Stakeholders such as people or organizations that the information is about might also have legitimate interest in what is done with the information. Organizations selecting datasets to be made available for free reuse should only select datasets that can be published so without violating the relevant legislation or the stakeholders' interests.

Not every dataset that an organisation can possibly publish as Open Data is equally relevant or interesting to the re-users. Understanding the demand for data might help organizations to focus on datasets that are relevant to the re-users which in turn might foster re-use of Open Data.

If publication of Open Data is driven only by the external pressures, public administrations might miss the opportunity to seize benefits for themselves. Therefore it is important for public sector bodies to understand their internal needs and priorities regarding their Open Data initiatives and take these needs and priorities into account when selecting datasets for publication.

There are certain categories of data that are in demand and whose re-use has already proven to bring economic or social benefits. High value data such as geodata, public transport data or public spendings data should be made available as open data.

When publishing information ensure that it can be read by people and also processed by computers. Also ensure that the information is accessible in languages that are suitable for the people who might want to find/use this information.

Spatial information is helpful as a way of finding information.

There are many approaches towards increasing the use and re-purposing of PSI.  Making the publication process scalable is facilitated by a mechanism to easily identify private and confidential information that should not be published.  All other material can be directed to citizens and intermediary processors such as journalists or data specialists.  The end product should be an industrialised process that provides a standardised and quality-assured information product that is the foundation of a sustainable PSI business model.

Metadata must be provided for both human users and computer applications

The overall features of a dataset must be described by metadata

Information about locale parameters (date, time, and number formats, language) should be described by metadata.

Information about the schema and internal structure of a distribution must be described by metadata

Data license information should be available

Data provenance information should should be available.

Data Quality information should be available.

Information about dataset versioning should be available.

A version history should be available.

Datasets must be identified by a persistent URI.

URIs should be assigned to individual versions of datasets as well as the overall series.

Data must be available in a machine-readable standardized data format that is adequate for its intended or potential use.

Data should be available in multiple data formats.

Standardized terms should be used to provide metadata

Existing reference vocabularies should be re-used where possible

When creating or re-using a vocabulary for an application, a data publisher should opt for a level of formal semantics that fit data and applications.

Data must not infringe a person's right to privacy.