What is openness? ‘Open knowledge’ is any content, information or data that people are free to use, re-use and redistribute — without any legal, technological or social restriction. Open knowledge is what open data becomes when it’s useful, usable and used.
Key features of openness:
- Availability and access: the data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.
- Reuse and redistribution: the data must be provided under terms that permit reuse and redistribution including the intermixing with other datasets. The data must be machine-readable.
- Universal participation: everyone must be able to use, reuse and redistribute — there should be no discrimination against fields of endeavour or against persons or groups. For example, ‘non-commercial’ restrictions that would prevent ‘commercial’ use, or restrictions of use for certain purposes (e.g. only in education), are not allowed.
Types of Open Data:
- Culture: Data about cultural works and artefacts — for example titles and authors — and generally collected and held by galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
- Science: Data that is produced as part of scientific research from astronomy to zoology.
- Finance: Data such as government accounts (expenditure and revenue) and information on financial markets (stocks, shares, bonds etc).
- Statistics: Data produced by statistical offices such as the census and key socioeconomic indicators.
- Weather: The many types of information used to understand and predict the weather and climate.
- Environment: Information related to the natural environment such presence and level of pollutants, the quality and rivers and seas.
Open Knowledge Foundation, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Image attribution: Data by Alfredo @ IconsAlfredo.com from the Noun Project
