Identification of high-value dataset determinants: is there a silver bullet?

Open Government Data (OGD) are seen as one of the trends that can potentially benefit the economy, improve the quality, efficiency, and transparency of public services, as well as transform our lives contributing to efficient sustainability-oriented data-driven development. However, the achievement of these benefits is closely linked to the “value” of the OGD, i.e. the extent to which the data provided by public agencies are interesting, useful and valuable for their reuse, creating value for society and the economy. Here, the concept of “high-value datasets” comes, pointing to data that would create highest value to society and economy. Although an agreement in PSI directive has been reached on a list of six universal categories to be considered as high-value data sets, they are quite generic / high-level. It is also known that this is a country-specific question where the nature of the specific data sets, which are considered to be of high value, depends on country-specific aspects and should therefore be determined by the countries themselves. We aim to develop the framework for identification of high-value datasets (and their determinants) as a result of comprehensive study conducted jointly with participants of ICEGOV.

This is a community-based, participatory, interactive workshop aimed at engaging participants – instead of asking participants to write a paper to be later presented during the workshop in the form of sit-and-listen, we expect to establish a lively and interesting discussion of novel ideas, answering existing questions and raising new ones. This also expects to contribute to networking with international experts, researchers, practitioners, government officials, policymakers. A long-term objective is to conduct a comprehensive study and to publish a co-authored paper with active and engaged participants of this workshop.

Objectives for the participants

The objective of the workshop is to raise awareness of and establish a network of the major stakeholders around the HVD issue, allow each participant to think about how and whether the determination of HVD is taking place in their country and how this can be improved with the help of portal owners, data publishers, data owners and citizens. Our main motivation is that, as members of the ICEGOV community, we could jointly answer the following questions representing the objectives of the workshop:

• How can the “value”” of open data be defined?
• What are the current indicators for determining the value of data? Can they be used to identify valuable datasets to be opened? What are the country-specific high-value determinants (aspects) participants can think of?
• How high-value datasets can be identified? What mechanisms and/ or methods should be put in place to allow their determination? Could it be there an automated way to gather information for HVD? Can they be identified by third parties, e.g. researchers, enthusiasts AND potential data publishers, i.e. data owners?
• What should be the scope of the framework, i.e. who should be the target audience who should be made aware of the HVD applying this framework? public officials / servants? data owners? Intermediaries? (discussion with participants OR direction for our discussion depending on the participants and their profile).

This, however, will serve as a knowledge base and an input for the framework for identification of high-value datasets we expect to develop as a result of comprehensive study conducted jointly with participants of ICEGOV.

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