The open data landscape

Abstract

The opening of data has grown tremendously over the past decade. More and more datasets have been opened to the public, application programming interfaces (APIs) gave been design for enabling the public to make use of real-time data and new apps based on this data have been developed. Data about policy-making, software code (open sources), documents, minutes, financial data and so on has been opened resulting in a large repository of government data that can be on open data portals and government websites. Nevertheless the potential is even more higher, as most of the data still are closed and not directly accessible by the public. Furthermore, more and more data is collected and can be share in nowadays words driven by The Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT consist of devices that are able to collect data such as GPS (geographical location), Compass, temperature, movement, pollution and so on. Devices collecting data combined with data analytics are expected to transform the government and society. This can provide insight into the energy consumption of smart cities (https://amsterdamsmartcity.com/projects/energy-atlas ) or the pollution (http://airindex.eea.europa.eu/ ). These initiates are all driven by the opening of data and extended by user-friendly apps to enable a large use by the public.