13th European Conference on eGovernment – ECEG 2013 1 | Page 327

Sébastien Martin et al.

Application contests help data providers identify new ideas to reuse the data. However, as Janssen( 2012) noted « little is known about the conversion of public data into services of public value ». The way in which sustainable services can be created from these initiatives would require further studies.

4.3 Sustainable business models for the production of data

Data creators are indirectly funded through taxation, sometimes by the sale of data or services created from these data. This has led to much debate in the UK about the opening of geographic data from the Ordnance Survey. Releasing data for free on the Internet entails a risk to weaken the data production process and jeopardize the data quality( Uhlir, 2009). Moreover, this might create a distortion in the competition between companies, since certain companies have already established business models based on data they have paid for. Opening data in this case entails a risk for the business model of companies that already use public data.

Table 3: Summary of risks related to the economic issues

Identified risk The cost of opening data

Benefits and return on investment

Sustainable business models for the production of data

5. Risks related to licenses and legal frameworks 5.1 Heterogeneous licenses across datasets

Contingency actions Assessing the costs of not opening; Share part of the costs with other Open Data platforms Adopt a realistic approach to costs and benefits; Encourage stakeholders who use Open Data to indicate that use Promote networking between stakeholders; participate in clusters that sustain incubation of companies grounding their business model on Open Data

Legal constraints raise mainly the risk of fragmentation of Open Data, if the licenses and conditions for reuse are mutually incompatible. Indeed, a number of services are based on multiple datasets( e. g., mashups) for which managing heterogeneous conditions of reuse is very challenging.

This risk is linked to an incomplete openness of data if re‐use or commercial use of the data is limited by the licenses. It has been taken into account by the British authorities: in 2011 they changed their license. The former, Click‐Use Licence did not allow modifying data. The new Open Government License overcomes this limitation by explicitly allowing changes in the data. This shows the potential value of defining an Open Data initiative at the national level with a partially top‐down approach where the national catalogue not only aggregates data, but also defines a real editorial policy, the UK catalog opens over 9000 datasets released with a single license. Rennes has followed the same trend to a greater openness. Coherent conditions of reuse are expected to facilitate the reuse of data.

In Rennes, the whole datasets recorded were covered by the license Rennes Métropole V2. In Berlin, the datasets follow a slightly less homogeneous licensing model. In both cases, licenses applied to datasets in Berlin are open, except for 4 datasets( Table 4).

Table 4: Licenses in Berlin

5.2 The stacking of rights over individual datasets

The stacking of rights on a dataset happens when several organizations claim ownership or control over a dataset and the conditions of its opening. Some may contest the opening and delay it. In Rennes, this has been prevented by the early involvement of the local transporter, Keolis 14, in the data opening process.

14 http:// www. keolis. com /

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