Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

78 O P E N I N N O V A T I O N 2 0 1 3
roadworks or spontaneous events such as public
transport strikes can also be available online [12].
Geolocation data are especially important when
they create an added social and economic value in
combination with any other public sector information.
In some cases, these data are available only
for non-commercial or personal use; in other cases,
there are fully open and interoperable data, which
can be reused by Web developers to create new
types of desktop and mobile applications for city
mobility.
In order to follow the trends, regulate cities’ mobility,
evaluate the ICT impact on mobility issues
and promote the best practices across the Member
States, the EU institutions are setting up legal
and conceptual initiatives containing some general
rules.
The aforementioned PSI directive of 2003 is one of
the most tangible results of such commitment to
support PSI openness and availability ( 1 ).
Open data EU case: London urban mobility
Currently, the United Kingdom is probably THE European
country where open data are getting the most
attention from central and local governments and
where the PSI directive was rigorously implemented
and a truly open data strategy is enforced.
As an international business, financial and cultural
centre, the City of London is forced to optimise the
public transport system. Most of the decisions concerning
public transport system development in
London are technical or urban by nature, but recent
ICT technologies are also being used to help a modern
megalopolis become more mobile and comfortable
for citizens and visitors alike.
In 2008, the UK Government launched a special
plan, the pan-government initiative ‘UK Location
Programme’; its main aim is to implement the EU
INSPIRE directive [13] in a proper way, by improving
the sharing and reuse of public sector location
information.
The main idea is to open PSI data sets as much as
possible, and encourage entrepreneurs to reuse this
open data information. The government decided
that the process of sharing PSI data across the
( 1 ) In this context, it is important to keep in mind that the meaning
of ‘Public Sector Information’ (PSI) should not be confused
with the meaning of ‘open data’. They are not necessarily synonyms
especially when PSI is stored by governmental services
and not open to other stakeholders such as citizens, commercial
and non-commercial organisations. However, often PSI
and open data definitions can overlap, and even be identical,
in situations where public sector information is open access.
country was so ineffective that people and official
bodies were simply wasting time and money trying
to get the information. The proposal was to
improve the sharing opportunities through common
interoperability standards and common Web
infrastructures (websites in these terms). Moreover,
according to this initiative, all the data should be
updated regularly.
Citizens and communities in general are encouraged
to create and develop new PC and mobile
applications or to improve already existing government
services [14]. In parallel, government departments
are encouraged to open their PSI. A guide is
provided on how to publish data easily, and a website
forum offers additional assistance [15]. The
authorities also give some suggestions for potential
apps based on all this PSI: traffic management,
location-based services, and social-economic services
are all mentioned as possible apps solutions.
In June 2012, the UK Government published a new
document, Open Data White Paper — Unleashing
the Potential [16], emphasising the idea that ‘transparency
is at the heart of the agenda for government’.
The underlying principle of the UK Government
is that ‘data that can be published should be
published’; this distinguishes the United Kingdom
and the ‘London case’ in particular. For this reason,
each UK government department (from Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs to Culture Media
and Sport — a total of 14 departments) took the
principle as a primary rule, and published its first
ever open data strategies plans to open and publish
new data sets with a 2 year perspective. Departments
also stated how they are going to motivate
a market and developers for the newly available
open data.
Access to the data is given with an Open Government
Licence for PSI, which means that citizens,
non-commercial, and even commercial, organisations
can copy, publish, distribute, transmit and
adapt presented data sets, as well as utilise the
information commercially, including the possibility
of combining it with other data sets and using it in
their own products and services. The main conditions
are attribution to the source of the information
and a link to the Open Government Licence for
PSI itself must be included. The licence does not
cover any personal data or any information under
the intellectual property rights law.
It also provides for privacy and data security safeguards,
stressing that personal data is anonymised
and anonymous data sets are not altered. Finally,
the authors of the White Paper proclaim that a shift