What Is Open Data And Why Should You Care About It?

In this guide, I am going to be discussing all the open data and why it is essential. I’ll also be telling you how you can do it yourself. There is a debate about how open data in the government is something that is evolving; it is indisputable that it is here to stay. It can be heard in both of the houses of Congress, and state legislature and also in the city halls around the country. Almost 39 states and more than 46 localities have been providing data sets to data.gov, the federal government’s online repository for open data. 30 jurisdictions, including a lot of the federal government, have taken many steps of initialisation for practices.

 

Open data is something that has been spoken of very frequently, and it has been since Obama took office in the year 2009. What it is and why it is very important is not exactly always clear. That is why, I’m going to be talking about it. People tend to conflate it with big data. It is very useful, and it is different from big data. When I think about open data, it is a manifestation of the idea of an open government. For governments that are hoping to adopt an open data policy and also practice it, simply making the data available to the public is not exactly enough to make this data useful. Open data, even though straightforward in principle, requires a very specific approach which is completely based on the agency and the organisation that is releasing it. The kind of data that is being released and also perhaps most importantly, the target audience.

Technically speaking, open data is available in machine-readable standard formats which means that it can be retrieved and properly processed by any kind of computer application. Legally speaking, open data is explicitly licensed in a way that would permit commercial and also non-commercial use. It can be reused without any kind of restrictions. It is easily accessible for its intended audience. If the intended audience is developers or even programmers, the data should be presented within the application programming interface. If it is for researchers in academia, the date of maybe structure in a kind of a bulk download. If it is aimed at the average citizen, the data should be available without having to require any kind of software purchases. Having Microsoft office should not exactly be a requirement for accessing the data. Whenever possible, open data should come packaged in a huge variety of file formats that can be used however possible.

 

Creating open data is not exactly without complexities. There are a lot of tasks that need to happen before an open data project begins.