icegov2012 proceedings

movement to pressure for open government data and creating
applications for society from these data. Thus, also received
support from large organizations in the country as the Open
Society Institute, the Omidyar Foundation and the Ford
Foundation.
Despite the limited knowledge available on the subject, it is
possible to envisage the emergence of OGD is appearing in many
countries of the world.
This article will explore the state of the art of using OGD in
Brazil. The methodology used was literature on subject of OGD
and an exploratory study of some of the few experiences in Brazil.
Due to its recent creation, websites that provide open data were
not analyzed by its impacts, but only their potential for promoting
transparency, social control and citizen participation by offering
OGD.
First, the paper presents a concept discussion about OGD. Then, it
was chosen three Brazilians cases to analyze through two methods
of analysis of Brazilian initiatives: the eight principles of OGD
and the five stars of linked data ranking. The data collection
occurred through structured inspection of these three OGD
Portals.
Regardless of open data might be considered in both the public
and in private, this article, as a matter of focus, is only open to
government data in government. Once the conceptual discussion,
the article identifies some of the experiences of reference and uses
them to make an exploratory reflection on the limits and
possibilities of the OGD contribute in social struggle around the
transparency practices and the relationship between government
and civil society, because the data open not only relate to the
dissemination of information but also to encourage new uses for
the citizens of public data.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Open Government Data
Open Government Data (OGD) is a term used to denote
governmental information available via the Internet in the public
domain for free use by society [17]. This concept refers to the
protection of public data as belonging to the citizen, which should
have unrestricted access to government information, advocated by
several authors [22, 17, 23], among others. It also refers to the
context of recent development of ICT, where the Internet,
databases, tools, standards and open formats allow and facilitate
the provision and access to this information.
The idea of the OGD is developed from the discussion on open
data engendered by Tim O'Reilly, owner of O'Reilly Media in
mid-2007. In the same year, along with O’Reilly’s with others
specialists joined by 30 supporters of open government to discuss
OGD and its importance to democracy [24]. At this meeting of
experts and advocates of OGD, it was developed the eight
principles OGD. These principles state that the OGD should be:
1) Complete: All public data is made available. Public data is
data that is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege
limitations.
2) Primary: Data is as collected at the source, with the highest
possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified
forms.
3) Timely: Data is made available as quickly as necessary to
preserve the value of the data.
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4) Accessible: Data is available to the widest range of users for
the widest range of purposes.
5) Machine understandable: Data is reasonably structured to
allow automated processing.
6) Non-discriminatory: Data is available to anyone, with no
requirement of registration.
7) Non-proprietary: Data is available in a format over which no
entity has exclusive control.
8) License-free: Data is not subject to any copyright, patent,
trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy,
security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.
Civil society organizations are using these principles of
governments to levy the availability of government information.
[25] presented at an event in 2009, the three laws of open
government data:
1) A blog about the project;
2) If data is not found and indexed on the web, it does not
exist;
3) If not already open and available in machine-understandable
format, it cannot be exploited;
4) If any legal provision does not allow its replication, it is
useless.
Benefits of adopting the OGD in the field of transparency and
social control are, at least in theory, evident. The provision of
OGD tends to contribute to the increased transparency of
government, creating better opportunities for social control of
government actions. However, given the relative newness of the
topic, yet there have been no studies that show the whole of this
possibility.
A second category of benefits can also be addressed. It is the
possibility of creating new information and applications from the
open government data. In this case, transparency is not only
encouraged, but also new services may originate from the
interaction between government and society through the
exploitation of OGD. These services can be generated through
new ways of working collaboratively across the participatory
government and private institution, since the concept of OGD
avoids the vision of the citizen as a mere recipient of public
information.
The focus on the concept of citizen open government data is
emphasized by [26], pointing the concept relates to an
understanding that the way governments have their information
available allows the intelligence collectively create better ways to
work with them than the governments themselves could do. As an
example, [26] says that “it would be possible to optimize
resources in public administration, if they leach from the traffic
data in urban open format”. Thus, citizens who would take care
through the use of ICT to produce charts and graphs on traffic.
To [23], "the provision of open government data allows
information to be used in the manner and convenience of the
person concerned so that they can be mixed and matched to add
more value to the data." For this author, the purpose of the public
information is made available under the rules of open data is
overcome the limitations that exist for users of public information
can easily find, access, understand and use the public data
according to their interests and convenience [23].