Open Access to Public Sector Information: Making Data Effectively Available

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay (1)

1 ISCC - Institut des Sciences de la Communication du CNRS

Implementing an effective open data policy implies making sure datasets will be available without economical, technical, social or legal restrictions for any purpose, including mash up and carry persistent semantic annotation so that others may continue to build upon augmented datasets. Technical and legal accessibility requires the use of open formats, the inclusion of information for reusability and licensing conditions which avoid legal interoperability bottleneck. While numerous declarations1 provide definitions and requirements for open data, technical accessibility has to be accompanied by institutional platforms. Public policies should be enacted by governments in order to make sure these platforms get populated by data, for instance by mandating data produced and digitalized with public funding to be uploaded in an open format. This contribution proposes a technical, policy and legal framework which could be implemented in an integrated platform encompassing the complete workflow of public sector information from upload by the contribution to transformative successive reuses, allowing a persistent availability of data for citizens, researchers and innovators. Recommendations are proposed, building on incremental criterias which are being analyzed in each section of this article.

Mots clés: information science; copyright law; licenses; terms of use; metadata; e-infrastructure; interoperability; Creative Commons; governance; technical regulation; public domain; public policy; open access

Domaines: Droit; Sciences de l'information et de la communication; Science politique

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. Open Access to Public Sector Information: Making Data Effectively Available. 2012. ⟨halshs-00736923⟩