Open Data is a philosophy that aims to make available to the whole society that manages the data public in the development of their functions in easy to handle and raw (unprocessed).
Thus, any citizen or company should be able to analyze, reuse and redistribute this data, creating new value added services and thus allowing the Civil deepen concepts like transparency towards citizens (open government) and promoting wealth creation through intelligent resource management (intelligent government).
The purpose of this information open to the public is that both private citizens and businesses to reuse this data to generate economic value. Make them available to the company makes any person, company or organization can build upon them a new idea to generate new data, knowledge or creating new services to report economic benefits and/or social to the final. These companies or people using public data to give added value are called "reusers".
The terms Open Data and RISP (Reuse of Public Sector Information) are closely related. The term "Open Data" is older and is a result of Law 37/2007 on "reuse of public sector information" when it begins to take shape the term RISP. In both cases, the idea is to make available the information society "raw" to keep the administration.
Although the terms may seem similar, the concept pursues Open Data open data formats completely free (non-owners) and is not considered payment for data usage (should be free). However, the reuse of information the government provides for the payment for the use of these data and the publication of data in any format.
Public: We need to open all public data (all those, of course, not subject to privacy restrictions, security or copyright). There should be another work by the administration in deciding what information is relevant.
Detailed: We have to open the raw data. That is, it is necessary to publish as they are in their origin, unprocessed and therefore maintaining the highest possible level of detail.
Update: It should ensure consistency of data being published. That is, the data must be accurate and current.
Accessible: There should be no restriction for those who want to make use of the data, or the purpose of use.
Automated: The data must be structured so that they can be automatically processed by a computer. This is a very important condition so they can reuse the data automatically. If the City has posted the data in PDF format, these would not be actionable by a programming language. However, if the public, for example, structured XML format, it is easily understandable language for computers and can be reused in an automated manner.
Without Registration: No registration is required to access the data. If to download data from the municipality monuments require us to sign an agreement or checking into the page, neither could consider Open Data.
Open: data formats can not rely on an entity or an entity owns a tool. As an example, an open format would be CSV or XML formats while owners would Word, Excel...
Free: The data must be free of rights, patents, copyright and may not be subject to rights of privacy, security or privilege that may be regulated by other laws. As seen in the concept Risp would be the scenario where a charge administration or public price for the use of these data.
All these principles are necessary to make sure we are talking about Open Data and not another concept that would not fall within the real philosophy of Open Data.
The term "dataset" or "data set" refers to the categorization of public data in data catalogues. The raw data are organized into "data sets" or "datasets" to be more easily indexed and located. Therefore, using fields that define the data set as the description, the update frequency, format or license others.
Open Data formats:
Similarly, there are formats that prevent data from being opened. When data are formatted image (JPG, GIF, TIFF, etc...) Can not be considered structured because machines can not interpret its contents in an automatic manner. For PDF files, although it was originally to be universal (non-owners) are not structured as it may contain images or even be directly an image containing text. Formats such as Word or Excel, when proprietary formats, require licensed to use so it would not be advisable. For data in Excel format, these are easily exported to text formats like CSV itself would qualify for non-proprietary format.
As noted by the Law 37/2007 of reuse of public sector information, "the information generated from public, potentially giving it the development of the information society, is of great interest for companies when operating in its areas of activity, contributing to economic growth and job creation, and citizens as a guide for transparency and democratic participation." The administration itself, improving its efficiency and ability to interoperate with other administrations is also a beneficiary of this opening. From which it follows that there are three roles for which benefits are generated: businesses, citizens and government.
The economic advantages of open data come from the possibility that companies generate economic value from the data served by the general public, creating services and applications from these data free.
This translates into a new market niche based on digital content, which helps to create wealth and the ability to provide value-added services. It also encourages competition between companies, by providing the ability to monetize this free public information and making a profit.
The main advantage involves the free flow of public information is the approach to the principles of open government and smart, that is, one in constant conversation with citizens and facilitating the participation and cooperation of the public in the exercise of their functions.
The use and use of public data can generate various applications and services of social value that improve the lives of citizens. The creation of new services by private initiatives with the use of open data catalogues, involves the generation of new jobs.
Greater transparency: public expose data in a web portal in a standardized way so that both citizens and businesses or other institutions can, is a great step for information transparency and achieving one of the goals of open government. Citizens can have a clearer view of the actions and administration services and how their contribution is being invested and managing public resources.
Administrations can significantly reduce the costs of performing expensive applications that can now design other companies reusing these dates, thereby energizing the economy.
Management also benefits from the collaboration of citizens, those who are actively involved in public service improvement generated content themselves or ideas and initiatives created and promoted by them or new applications developed from public data release.
The data can be exchanged between different administrations (local, central, autonomic) thus promoting interoperability results in greater efficiency in the functioning of the administration and the workload of public employees, increasing collaboration between administrations, thus benefiting citizens.
Interoperability also entails lower costs due to the fact that to the extent that two data sets relate to the same type of information if the format selected by the different administrations is the more easily it allows new uses data to combine.
The possibility that the citizen collaborate allows policy makers to keep up with the concerns and interests of its neighbours.