OPEN DATA IN OPEN GOVERNMENT – WHAT IS BEING DISCUSSED?

Larissa Mariany Freiberger Pereira Graduate Program in Engineering and Knowledge Management /Federal University of Santa Catarina/[email protected]/Brazil

Guilherme Bertoni Machado Graduate Program in Engineering and Knowledge Management /Federal University of Santa Catarina/[email protected]/Brazil

José Leomar Todesco Graduate Program in Engineering and Knowledge Management /Federal University of Santa Catarina/[email protected]/Brazil

RESUMEN El movimiento "Gobierno Abierto" ha crecido y se ha ganado terreno en todo el mundo. Actualmente los gobiernos debaten formas de promover la democracia y la participación de la población en el proceso de administración pública. En este contexto, el movimiento "Datos Abiertos" aparece como uno de los pilares que apoyan las iniciativas para promover un gobierno abierto. En este artículo largo se propone plantear cuestiones que se están discutiendo en este campo de estudio a través de un estudio de la literatura basado en las publicaciones científicas más relevantes y que han sido más citadas acerca de este tema. A través de este estudio se observó que muchos países han participado en el desarrollo de acciones para promover un gobierno abierto mediante la apertura de sus datos. Sin embargo la mayoría de estos datos se ponen a disposición de la sociedad en formatos semiestructurados o no estructurados, haciendo su uso y el descubrimiento de conocimiento implícito que impregnan estos datos una tarea dificultosa. Por lo tanto, se puede concluir que la tecnología "Datos Abiertos Conectados" aparece como la principal alternativa en la actualidad para minimizar este problema, ya que estandariza los datos en formatos que se pueden conectar con otros datos de diferentes fuentes. Por lo tanto, esta tecnología promueve el uso de los datos del gobierno con todo el potencial que poseen. Palabras clave: datos abiertos; gobierno abierto; datos abiertos conectados.

ABSTRACT

The "Open Government" movement has grown and gained ground worldwide. Currently governments discuss ways to promote democracy and public participation in the process of public administration. In this context, the "Open Data" movement appears as one of the pillars supporting initiatives to promote open government. In this long article it proposes to raise issues that are being discussed in this field of study through a investigation of literature based on the most important scientific publications that have been cited on this subject. Through this study we found that many countries have participated in the development of actions to promote open government by opening up their data. However most of these data are made available to society in semi-structured or non-structured formats, making its use and knowledge discovery implied that pervade these data a difficult task. Therefore, it can be concluded that the "Linked Open Data" technology appears as the main alternative today to minimize this problem, as it standardizes data formats that can be connected with other data from different sources. Therefore, this technology promotes the use of government data with all the potential they possess.

Keywords: open data; open government; linked open data.

1

INT RODUCTION

The advent of Open Government Movement changed the way that government interacts with society (citizens, businesses, institutions, foundations, etc). In countries where governments joined this movement, it is expected that society become more responsible for governance, as required by the modern society. On the other hand, it is hoped that governments create opportunities for these entities that are part of society to acquire knowledge from data managed by public sector (Theocharis & Tsihrintzis, 2014). In order to promote open government, many countries provide their government data in open data portals. Thus anyone can access these data, use, reuse and distributed them freely. These data are available mostly in semi-structured and unstructured formats. Thus the task of finding them on the web is becoming more difficult and labored over the constant increase of data that is available on the Web. The "Linked Open Data" technology appears, then, to minimize this problem, making it possible to establish semantic connections between data from different sources. The use of this technology by governments is relatively low and in addition, when governments provide their data using this technology usually end up not bothering to promote actions that facilitate the use of such data by society in general. In this paper we discussed how the "Open Government" movement has been relating with the "Open Data" movement and we investigated how the “Linked Open Data” technology has been used in this context. We seek to questions raised in relevant and more cited papers in academia, selected from three databases: IEEE, Scopus and Web of Science. Thus, we propose a dialogue between the authors to enrich the discussion on the topic. We structured this paper in five sections: in first section we presented a brief introduction about the research object; in second section we discuss some definitions of “Open Government”; posteriorly, in third section, we presented some definitions of “Open Data”; in fourth section we have developed a discussion about Open Data in Open Government and lastly, in fifth section, we brought some research conclusions.

2

DE FINITIONS OF OPEN GOVERNMENT

To understand what is Open Government, it is necessary to return to the Enlightenment period, where it was designed some ideas that later helped in the construction of this movement. Emerged in Europe around the 8th century, the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that motivated, through various thinkers, discussions about several topics, including the autonomy of the individual, who until then was seen merely as a part of the whole; the freedom of individuals; and social equality (Goldmann, 1973). These discussions were essential and strongly contributed to changes in models of society and government from that time. Jean-Jaques Rousseau (1996), French Enlightenment philosopher, defended the idea of democracy, which a government would reflect the popular will. According to Rousseau, the general will could be constructed from the direct participation of people in power. He used to emphasize the need for government to work for the general interests of people: “Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests in public business” (p. 82). Montesquieu (1757, p. 157), also French Enlightenment philosopher, proposed the separation of powers into three dimensions, namely: executive, legislative and judicial. The philosopher used to say that When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a single body of the magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyraniccally. Nor is there liberty if the power of judging is not separate from legislative power and from executive power. If it were joined to legislative power, the power over the life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the judge would be legislator. If it were joined to executive power, the judge could have the force of an oppressor. All would be lost if the same man or the same body of principal men, either of nobles, or of the people, exercised these three powers: that of making the laws, that of executing public resolutions, and that of judging the crimes or the dispute of individuals. It is possible to see how Enlightenment ideas influenced in the constructions of societies and government models that currently exist. In short, democracy, as discussed by Enlightenment thinkers, is therefore a fundamental aspect to the consolidation of Open Government movement, since this concept is primordial to design principles of Open Government, which will be discussed below.

Another concept had direct influence on the construction and design of Open Government movement: Openness. Peters and Britez (2008, p. xvii) says that Openness is a concept that has come to characterize knowledge and communication systems, epistemologies, society and politics, institutions or organizations, and individual personalities. In essence, openness in all these dimensions refers to a kind of transparency which is the opposite of secrecy and most often this transparency is seen in terms of access to information especially with within organizations, institutions or societies. According to Open Source, various concepts and movements emerged from the definitions of openness, for example:  Open Source – in the software universe, it relates to systems whose source code is available for anyone to modify or improve them (Open Source, 2013);  Open Education – this concept updates the way people produces, share and build knowledge. This movement believes that all people should have access to high-quality experiences and educational resources. People engaged in this movement work to oppose issues that may prevent this reality, as high costs, outdated or obsolete materials, among others. The idea of collaboration becomes a pillar of this new educational model (Open Source, 2014b);  Open Hardware – it regards to the specification of a physical object. This movement believes that the specifications of a hardware must be licensed in such a way that anyone can study, modify, create and distribute it (Open Source, 2014c). The definition of Openness brought up the idea that although knowledge is built by individuals, it does not belong to them as something that should be retained, as a possession. Instead, it becomes a good of humanity and can be used and modified as the needs of the different realities that exist. From these principles comes the Open Government movement. In short, it is a government “with high levels of transparency and mechanisms for public scrutiny and oversight in place, with an emphasis on government accountability” (Open Source, 2014a). For Open Government Partnership1 the Open Government movement is founded on four principles, namely: accountability, technology and inbnovation, citizen participation and transparency (Open Government Partnership, 2011). Open Government is inserted in the context of e-Government. This last one 1 Multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance (OGP, 2013).

has focused more squarely on the use of technology within the routine activities undertaken by public organizations: the provision of public services, the quality and cost-effectiveness of basic government operations, citizen engagement and consultation, the statutes and legislative mandates required to effect these processes, and the administrative and institutional reforms undertaken in pursuit of innovation. (Harrison et al., 2012, p. 84) 3

DE FINITIONS OF OPEN DATA

Being also influenced by the concept of Openness, open data, conceptually speaking, is data that “anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (Open Definition, 2014).

3.1

LINKED OPEN DATA

In 2006, in order to contribute to the consolidation of a Web where data would not only be published anyway, but could be connected to each other to better be explored, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a technology that allows datasets published on the web could be connected, the Linked Open Data. He also developed a classification system based on 5 stars to classify these datasets, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1 - 5 stars classification system for Linked Open Data2

2

http://5stardata.info/images/5-star-steps.png

Note: Pereira, Machado & Todesco, 2015

Datasets classified as 1 star are available on Web in any format, but with and Open License, so anyone can freely access, use, modify and share it. Datasets classified as 2 starts are those who, besides having the attributes of 1 star datasets, are available as machinereadable structured data, like a spreadsheet in .xls format. Datasets classified as 3 stars, besides having the attributes of 2 stars datasets, are available in a non-proprietary format, like a spreadsheet in .csv format instead in .xls format. Nowadays, data are mostly offered by government in heterogeneous formats and in a large scale. This fact makes difficult to people to search any kind of information and produce knowledge from them, mixing them (Hoxha & Brahaj, 2011; Theocharis & Tsihrintzis, 2014). The Linked Open Data technology comes to minimize this problem because, besides proposing a standartized data format, this technology allows the establishment of conexions between data from different datasets, making more natural the discovering of new and implicit knowledge from those explict data. About that, Shadbolt and O’Hara (2013, p. 72) say that “linked data can extract maximum value, supporting reuse in unanticipated contexts”.

4

OP EN DATA IN OPEN GOVERNMENT Data made available by governments is also called “Open Government Data”. To

Zulkarnain (2014, p. 140),

Open government data is the indicator which represents the spirit of freedom of information in many countries.The availability of freedom of information act and open data portal in a country are the significant sub-indicator for measuring the level of open government in the country’s e-government score. Freedom of information act is considered as the basic requirement that must exist prior to further implementation of open government data while open data portal is considered as a media that can be accessed by citizen to obtain government data without restrictions. Attard, Orlandi and Auer (2016, p. 2605) highlighted some reasons to government open their data, namely “transparency, participatory governance, and releasing social and commercial value”. In other words, governments that open their data create opportunity to society participate in governance processes – taking decisions and making policy with government – and allow people access, use, reuse and distribute data in an unbureaucratic way. Despite the term “Open Government” is closely related to the term “Open Data”, “open government is not merely a project of releasing government data to the public for transparency, accountability” (Zulkarnain, 2014, p. 143). Actually, open the data to society is an important action to turn the government open, but not just it. According to Yang, Lo and Shiang (2015, p. 598), “open data is considered one of the key pillars to sustain open government”, so open data is not open government but is important to make government open. To Attard, Orlandi and Auer (2016, p. 2605), “by publishing such data the government encourages stakeholders to innovate upon it, and create new services”. It is important to understand that data generated by government are considerable valuable and from the time that society has freely access to open government data, a lot of information, hitherto unknown, can be discovered from these data. As previously said, although open government is not only about open data, it is an important action to make a government open. Yang, Lo and Shiang (2015) highlight some challenges faced by public managers to truly make their governments open and a big one is the fact that many agencies that make up government do not adhere to the Open Government Movement and do not open their generated data. Analyzing the experience of United State of America, in December 8th, 2009 President Barack Obama sent to all agencies that make up the US Government the Open Government Directive (OGD3) requesting the publication of open government data produced by them. Now, in June 22th, 2016 in the data.gov Portal it is available 183,717 datasets. Five agencies are responsible for publication of 125,524 (corresponding to approximately 68,32%

of all datasets) and there are 179 entities that publish and manage datasets in data.gov Portal, as shown in Table 1. Table 1 – Main Agencies that Publish Open Data in US Government

Agency

N. Datasets Published

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of

70,220

Commerce (NOAA) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

15,380

US Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of the Interior

26,345

Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of

8,120

Homeland Security (FEMA) Earth Data Analysis Center, University of New Mexico

5,459

Note: by Author.

Here we can notice that a few government agencies in USA actually joined seriously the Open Government Movement by opening their data, despite it had been determined by President Barack Obama. The Institute of e-Government of Waseda University in cooperation with the International Academy of CIO (IAC) had developed a methodology to evaluate worldwide eGovernment development by analyzing the evolution of “mainly 9 major indicators and 32 sub-indicators in the public sector, as well as the relationship between governments and their stakeholders. They include: (1) Network Preparedness; (2) Management Optimization; (3) Online Services; (4) National Portal/Homepage; (5) Government Chief Information Officer; (6)

e-Government

Promotion;

(7)

e-Participation/Digital

Inclusion;

(8)

Open

Government/Data and (9) Cyber Security” (Waseda University, 2015, p. 28). In 2015, these institutions had released the results of the 11th edition of e-Government ranking survey. In this context, we would like to focus on the results brought by the 8th indicator: Open Government/Data, whose evaluates the openness and transparency of governments. “The top ranking countries on this indicator have provided the citizens with an Application Programming Interface (API) that could help developers and researchers to create innovative citizen-centric applications” (Waseda University, 2015, p. 12). According to Waseda University (2015), the Top 10 ranking countries that open their data and favor the use of these are Australia, Canada, USA, Denmark, Germany, Korea, United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan and Austria, respectively. In this evaluation method the

presence of open data is evidenced by RSS Feed, Web API Services or an equivalent option provided by the e-Government application. Here we emphasize the need of actions by government that not only makes their available, but actions to encourage and facilitate the use of these by society in general. Regarding the publication of open data by governments in format that provides the linking of those with different datasets, Shadbolt and O’Hara (2013, p. 72) said that “the amount of linked data is very small as a proportion of government open data worldwide”. In general, governments still publish their open data in non-structured or semi-structured formats, not paying attention to the role of governments to promote the ease of use of their data.

5

CO NCLUSIONS

The "Open Data" movement appears as an important pillar that has collaborated in the success of the "Open Government" movement, and has also been support for this latter cited. However, the opening of government data is not sufficient for an effective participation of society in government administrative processes. Often governments make their data available in semi-structured and non-structured formats, making it difficult not only to find them on the Web by users, but also making difficult to use them with all the potential they have. Through this research we observed that, beyond the concern to make data available in formats that can be easily found on the Web, governments should also provide resources to users to make easier the use of these data. It is important to say that the use of "Linked Open Data" technology to available government data impacts directly to the opening level that the government provides to citizens, since the opening of data is inserted in the context of open government.

REFERENCES

Attard, J., & Orlandi, F. (2016, January). Value Creation on Open Government Data. In 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) (pp. 2605-2614). IEEE. Goldmann, Lucien. (2009). The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Routledge Revivals): The Christian Burgess and the Enlightenment. Abingdon: Routledge. Harrison, T. M., Guerrero, S., Burke, G. B., Cook, M., Cresswell, A., Helbig, N., Hrdinová, J., & Pardo, T. (2012). Open government and e-government: Democratic challenges from a public value perspective. Information Polity, 17(2), 83-97. Hoxha, J., & Brahaj, A. (2011, September). Open government data on the web: A semantic approach. In Emerging Intelligent Data and Web Technologies (EIDWT), 2011 International Conference on (pp. 107-113). IEEE. Montesquieu,

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(1757).

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http://www.opengovpartnership.org/>. Open Source. What is open source? [Internet]. [updated in 2013 jul 10; cited in 2016 may 13]. Available in: . _____. What is open government? [Internet]. [updated in 2014a may 09; cited in 2016 abr 05]. Available em: . _____. What is open education? [Internet]. [updated in 2014b jun 03; cited in 2016 may 13]. Available in: . _____. What is open hardware? [Internet]. [updated in 2014c ago 2014; cited in 2016 may 13]. Available in: Peters, M. A., & Britez, R. G. (Eds.). (2008). Open education and education for openness. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Rousseau, J. J. (1920). The Social Contract: & Discourses (No. 660). JM Dent & Sons.

Theocharis, S., & Tsihrintzis, G. A. (2014, July). Ontology development to support the Open Public data-The Greek case. In Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications, IISA 2014, The 5th International Conference on(pp. 385-390). IEEE. Waseda University. 2015 Waseda University – IAC International e-Government ranking survey, 2015. Yang, T. M., Lo, J., & Shiang, J. (2015). To open or not to open? Determinants of open government data. Journal of Information Science,41(5), 596-612. Zulkarnain, P. D. (2014, September). IntOGo: Inter-government open government model. In ICT For Smart Society (ICISS), 2014 International Conference on (pp. 139-144). IEEE.

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