Benefits and Risks of Open Government Data

Abstract

Public sector bodies maintain a large amount of data from various domains. This data represents a potential resource that organizations and individuals can use to enhance their own datasets or which can be used to develop new and innovative products and services. In order to foster the reuse of the data held by the public sector bodies a number of countries around the world has started to publish its data according to the Open Data principles. In this paper we present a set of benefits that can be achieved by publishing Open Government Data (OGD) and a set of risks that should be assessed when a dataset is considered for opening up. Benefits and risks presented in this paper were mostly identified during two of our OGD activities.