AIMS

Re-using Open Data ...: a new European Data Portal study report

The report 'Re-using Open Data - a study on companies transforming Open Data into economic and societal value' (2017) is published as part of the European Data Portal project. 

The European Data Portal is developed by the European Commission (EC) with the support of a consortium led by Capgemini Consulting, including INTRASOFT International, Fraunhofer Fokus, con.terra, Sogeti, the Open Data Institute (ODI), Time.Lex and the University of Southampton.

CONTEXT : OPEN DATA ... AROUND THE CORNER 

4 March 2017, International Open Data Day 2017 took place. This is the annual celebration of Open Data (OD) all over the world. For the fifth time in history, OD communities celebrated OD by organising local events on OD, such as hackathons (visit: the hashtag #ODD2017).

The European Union has adopted legislation to foster the re-use of Open (Government) Data. The expected impact of this legislation combined with the development of data portals, is to drive economic benefits and further transparency. Economic benefits are primarily derived from the re-use of Open Data. Value is there ... considering that OD is a powerful tool being used to solve problems around the world in ... 

... agriculture and nutrition: from drought, pests and diseases, to food security and food safety.

# FAOSTAT provides free access to food and agriculture data for over 245 countries and territories ... and covers all FAO regional groupings from 1961 to the most recent year available.

# The GODAN global initiative supports the proactive sharing of OD to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable to deal with the urgent challenge of world food security. GODAN has pulled together some Open Datasets which relate to agriculture and nutrition that you may want to consider. 

See also: GODAN Local Farming Challenge 2017; a newly set up GODAN Data Ecosystem Working Group.

#OpenDataHack @ECMWF - Beyond weather: explore creative uses of open data 4-5 March, 2017:

As part of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) activities, including the recently-added EU-funded Copernicus (Global Flood Awareness System : GLOFAS) services on climate and atmospheric monitoring, ECMWF has collected and created vast quantities of global environmental data  to make practical apps and build educational tools for weather prediction.

Boost your knowledge about OD with eLearning modules (+ More Training Material) available on European Data Portal, or explore its latest report on sustainability (Recommendations for OD Portals)...

Open Data portals are web-based interfaces designed to make it easier to find re-usable information. Like library catalogues, they contain metadata records of datasets published for re-use ...

Notable examples of Open Data portals maintained by public administrations in Europe are:

The European Data Portal complements national, regional or thematic OD portals, as well as the Open Data Portal of the EU institutions. In order to foster comparability of data published across borders, the European Data Portal represents metadata references in a common format (DCAT application profile for data portals in Europe) using RDF technology. Using machine-translation technology, it will progressively provide translations of metadata descriptions in all 24 languages...

Browse Datasets by 15 Categories (view: Some insights in the most popular Open Data categories) 

1. AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES, FORESTRY & FOODS

...   
 

RE-USING OPEN DATA : A STUDY ON COMPANIES TRANSFORMING OPEN DATA INTO ... VALUE  

The objective of the report 'Re-using Open Data - a study on companies transforming Open Data into economic and societal value' is to understand how organisations, primarily within the private sector, use OD and what business models have been developed around its re-use. 

The transformation of OD into value is explored and analysed based on the experiences of 200+ organisations. To illustrate the transformation and experiences of companies working with OD, more than 30 showcased companies are presented more in-depth.

# Example: WiseTown case study (slides)

It was found that:

  • in order to access OD, national OD portals are used most, followed by directly accessing the public administrations themselves;
  • the market size of OD is expected to increase by 36.9% from 2016 to 2020 to a value of 75.7 bn EUR in 2020;
  • well-established businesses use OD to: (1) enhance their existing services, (2) optimise their processes or (3) provide insights derived from data analysis to help solve clients’ business challenges;
  • 23% of the organisations expect their turnover related to OD to grow between 11% and 60% in the coming years;
  • 37% of the respondents forecast their turnover to increase by at least 61% annually;
  • ...

One of the key findings is that external as well as internal barriers do remain and hinder re-users to standardise or automate the collection and processing of OD.  

# Barriers in working with Open Data. 

The report concludes on a series of recommendations: 

  • External factors: getting the right OD.

​Here, re-users are dependent on what (quality, consistency) and how (meta)data providers make and deliver their OD to the re-users.

  • Internal factors: working the OD.

The internal factors relate to how the organizations transform the data into a product. For this to be successful, the organisations has to transform the data into knowledge (by adding to data unique value) and use this to solve a business challenge...

on how to further reap the benefits of OD.

# The public sector needs to better align their data provision strategy with the specific needs of users,

# while the private sector is invited to share further success stories around the re-use of OD and demonstrate how it benefits growth and innovation. 

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Source: Re-using Open Data - a study on companies transforming Open Data into economic and societal value (European Data Portal study report, 2017) 

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Related content: 

Topics: