The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) blog featured a story about the effort to openly make available public funded data in Iceland. The story was brought to OKF’s attention by Hjalmar Gislason, who also launched a wikipage, Opin gögn (’open data’), where he tries to pool information about nature and whereabout of public data and documents by inviting people to document these details on the wiki.
In these public data collections lies tremendous value. The data that has been collected for taxpayers’ money for decades or in a few cases even centuries (like population statistics) is a treasure trove of economical and social value. Yet, the state of public data is such that only a fraction of this value is being realized.
The reason is that accessing this data is often very hard. First of all its often hard to even find out what exists, as the sources are scattered, there is no central registry for existing data sets and many agencies don’t even publish information on the data that they have.
More worrying is that access to these data sets is made difficult by a number of restrictions, some accidental, other due to lack of funding to make them more accessible and some of these restrictions are even deliberate. These restrictions include license fees, proprietary or inadequate formats and unjustified legal complications.
