A Study on the Approaches of Value Realization of Open Government Data

Transcription

1 A Study on the Approaches of Value Realization of Open Government Data Li Baiyang School of Information Management, Wuhan University, China Supervisor: Huang Ruhua School of Information Management Wuhan University, China ABSTRACT Background Since the Open Government Directive was issued in 2009, US government first start the project of open government data (). As an update and innovation of open government information, is regarded that there are lots of values. The US government defined its values are transparency, participation and collaboration. With the construction and development of national platforms such as Data.gov, Data.gov.uk and some websites like that, is considered that it contains more values in political, economic, social administration and technology. However, the values of have not yet be realized and more achievements should be made under the big data environment. Purpose There are several factors affect the value realization of, for example, information policy is the foundation to do this work. And, information technology is a direct influencing factor for the value realization of from the aspects of data collection, data organization, data visualization and program development. In addition, economic factor also could aspect which projects should we invest of. Thus, this article tries to examine the value realization of in different approaches. In this paper, different factors be combined to a framework and the solutions are proposed. Although the development of is a dynamic process, the framework will function to realize the values of as more as possible from different ways including information policy, information technology and economy. At last, we hope we can provide a reference for the value realization of especially for the developing countries. The research questions are as follows: RQ1: What is the value system of? RQ2: Which factors affect the value realization of? RQ3: How we can boost the value realization of in different approaches? Design/methodology/approach Mixed methodology was used in this paper. Firstly, literature investigation was employed in this paper to define the value system of. We invested government policy files from and the key articles from different countries and institutions. Secondly, we construct a framework which contains the 126

2 factors which could affect the value realization of by information ecosystem method, and analysis the detail functions of these factors. Findings Based on the previous studies in this field, several findings were concluded in this paper. Firstly, value system of were summarized from four main aspects which are political value, social value, economic value and technology value, and each value contains a number of sub-values. Secondly, we create a framework to recognize the ecosystem and impact factors of value realization of. This framework does instructional functions which has good expansibility. As last, we proposed several suggestions for value realization of in different approaches such as strengthen information infrastructure construction, guarantee the continuity of information policy, development administrative strategy, etc. Practical implications Big data is changing our life in different ways, for now, it mainly works in economic field. consists with public data and social data, these datasets could release energies in more fields, such as social administration. People could easy get data and useful information from to make their life more efficient. This study is order to mine the maximum potential of values, we trust is needed to develop and we can get more achievements. Under the background of global economic malaise, it s important to develop the new economic driving force and make the social efficiency, accuracy and sustainable development in all-round ways. Originality/value This article studied the what are values of and how to realize the values by a framework of influence factors of in different approaches by three research questions. These questions are urgent to be solved when we push the development of. And, this study could provide a useful reference on development for developing countries. Keywords open government, open government data, values, big data, data sharing, open data 1 INTRODUCTION With the rapid development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), government is generating and storing more and more types of public data which gradually has the characteristics of Big Data. It could be named government data or government big data. Since the U.S. government released Open Government Directive (White house, 2009) in 2009, a variety of countries started to release their own policies of Open Government Data () and created portals of such as data.gov.uk, data.gov.au, data.gov.sg and some portals like that. It s widely admitted that occupies a significant position to a national economy and the social development in the era of Big Data. The Open Government Directive refer to the values of at the earliest as transparency, participation and collaboration, then, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, France and more governments interpret the values of in their own policies and regulations. Based on the promotion of by government and scholars, an increasing number of citizens and commercial personnel are aware of the values of in daily work and life. However, there are still a range of barriers in the work of open and sharing government data that make normal individuals apply not easily. For instance, data quality is the key 127

3 factor that can determine its value, information infrastructure could be important for people to use expediently. Besides, there are several factors which influence realizing the values of. Therefore, this study employ the information ecology theory to explore the factors which influence the value realization of and try to find approaches to achieve goals for. 2 LITERATURE REVIEW As a research hotspot with interdisciplinary attributes, has attracted lots of researchers or research institutions start to research from different views. Janssen etc. (2012) firstly studied the concepts, values and barriers, he considered that there are 3 aspects of values of which are political and social values, economic values, operation and technology values. Charalabidis etc. (2014) established a value model of and divide the values into 11 levels, such as Data Provision Capabilities (DPV), Data Search and Download Capabilities (DSD), User-level Feedback Capabilities (UFB), Ease of Use (EOU), Performance (PER), Data Processing Capabilities (DPR), Data Upload Capabilities (DUP), etc.. Attard etc. (2016) use the data life-cycle method studies the approaches of value realization of, this study believe that the value realization of contains Data Creation, Data Harmonisation, Data Publishing, Data Interlinking, Data Exploitation and Data Curation. Zeleti etc. (2016) studied data provider, data organizer, data consumer and other stakeholders of are the key factors in the value realization of. Alexopoulos etc. (2016) studied the value generation mechanism of from the information system perspective. In order to provide the technical support for, the technology of open data was introduced to. For example, Ding etc. (2011) researched the technology and environment of Linked Open Government Data (L), and L has rapidly became the mainstream of data organization method for. The U.K. (Shadbolt, 2012) and Greece (Galiotou and Fragkou, 2013) government adopted L in their projects. Janssen and Kuk (2015) then proposed a new framework named Big and Open Linked Data (BOLD) which combined Big Data, Linked Data and Open Data. They all believe that technology will boost the value realization of directly. In addition, from users views, Zuiderwijk etc. (2015) employed questionnaire survey to study the acceptance and use predictors of. Janssen and Zuiderwijk (2014) also create an Infomediary Business Model to explore the relationship between data provider and data user. Lee etc. (2015) used a self-determination theory to study how users use the. Elliot etc. (2016) studies how to use the End User Licence (EUL) to ensure the rational use of. There are other related works, Attard etc. (2015) and Charalabidis etc. (2016) both used literature survey analyzes the current research hotspot. As the new development of egovernment and open government information, has more features, carrying more functions and faces more barriers, it obvious that the road of value realization has twists and turns, however, under the power of research together, we could achieve the goals of. 3 METHODOLOGY 3.1 literature investigation This study firstly uses literature investigation to confirm values of from policy texts. Although different people have different opinions on values of, we still need to build the value system of. In order to ensure the authority of the policy texts, we collected the texts from U.S. government websites and U.K. government websites. 128

4 Table 1. U.S. and U.K. policies Year Before 2009 U.S. policies U.K. policies Freedom of Information Act, FOIA Local Government Information) Act (Access to Government in the Sunshine Act Freedom of Information Act Information Quality Act, IQA Honest Leadership and Government Act of Open Re-use of Public Sector Information Directive President s Memorandum on Power of Transparency and Open Government Report Information Taskforce Open Government Directive Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government Open Government Plan Open Government License for Public Sector Information The UK Government Framework UKGLF 2011 Licensing Digital Government: Building a 21st Information Principles for the UK Century Platform to Better Serve the Public Sector American People Simplifying PSI Re-use in the United Winning the Future through Open Kingdom: the UK Government Innovation a Progress Report on Licensing Framework and the Open Our Open Government Initiative Government Licence 2012 Transparency and Open Government Open Data Strategy Digital Government Strategy Open Data White Paper: Unleashing the Potential Big Data Research and Development Initiative Protection of Freedoms Act 2013 Making Open and Machine Readable Open Government the New Default for Government Summit Statement Information Open Data Policy Information as an Asset 2014 Partnership Seizing the Data Opportunity: a Managing Strategy for UK Data Capability Open Government Plan Version 3.0 US Open Data Action Plan 129

5 Big Data: Seizing Preserving Values Opportunities, Digital Accountability Transparency Act 2015 and Launching the Police Data Initiative Open Document Format (ODF): Guidance for UK Government Increasing Transparency of Federal Spending by Making Federal Spending The Re-use of Public Sector Data Accessible, Searchable, and Information Regulations 2015 Reliable 2016 Open Data: Empowering Americans to Open Government Partnership: UK Make Data-Driven Decisions National Action Plan The Federal Big Data Research and Development Strategic Plan As Table 1 shows, U.S. and U.K., the two most mature countries in, both issued a variety of policies. Through the analysis of above policy texts, we can summary the value of mainly are political value, social value (administrative value), economic value and technological value. As Table 2 shows, for each value, there are also sub-value in it, such as, political value contains transparency, democracy and some factors like that. The most significant matter is to build a value framework by the policy texts. V1 political values V11 improve transparency and credibility V12 improve government data management capability V13 improve decision making and administrative capability V14 enhance data security Table 2. Value framework of V2 social values V3economic values V21 Convenience V31 simplified services for public burocratic procedures V22 improve the V32 create new social governance economic driving capacity force V23 public data V33 adjust economic resources development structure V24 improve public participation V34 precision management V4 technological values V41 openness V42 compatibility V43 reliability V44 security 3.2 Information ecology theory Information ecology theory combines relevant theories of information and ecology, probe into the realizing mechanism, maintain mechanism and resuming mechanism of information ecological equilibrium. Government data management is a form of information system (IS), design and implementation of IS should consider the interior and exterior information environment. That means, Information ecology theory has applicability to the government data management especially. Figure 1 illustrates a model of ecosystem which contains 5 procedures that are generation, organization, publishing, consuming and evaluation. 130

6 generation evaluation ecosystem organization consumption publishing Figure 1. ecosystem generation It includes 2 ways, one is collection and another one is provide. In this process, it s must be considered that which types, how much and from where of should we collect. And, it s also very important that what are users needs and how we can meet the needs by generation. In other words, meet users needs is to realize the values of organization It s mainly refers to technology and standard. As mentioned above, some researchers have applied Linked Data, Big Data and Semantic Web method on. Also, it is important to note that the taxonomy of because it is a kind of multiple-source heterogeneous data publishing After organization, how to publish the become an issue. It s different from the open government information (OPI), needs the support of platform and corresponding technology. For example, the platform should provide functions for data retrieval, download, upload and security. And, the platform is the key link for connecting data providers and data consumers consumption consumption includes data download, data analysis, data development and other data application behaviors. Different users have different purposes for consuming. For instance, citizens like to use to make life more convenient, business users focus on the commercial development by data mining, scholars prefer to study derived inspiration from evaluation As the end the ecology, evaluation provide the assessment, communication and repair mechanisms for the sustainable development. 4 FINDINGS 4.1 Impact factor analysis 131

7 In the ecosystem, every procedure has its impact factor for value realization. For example, generation is influenced by information policy, organization is affected by information technology. primary factors generation secondary factors information information policy organization infrastructure information technology publishing information system management investment consumption evaluation Values Figure 2. Impact factors of value realization of Figure 2 analyzes the primary factors and secondary factors which could influence the value realization of based on the ecosystem. Primary factors mean that such factors will influence value realization straightly or deeply, secondary factors mean that those factors could affect value realization in an indirect way. 4.2 Approaches to deal with the impact factors After we got the value system, ecosystem and impact factors of, it s time to find the approaches to deal with the impact factors. In this paper, we make the approaches as following steps: Step 1: make information policy comprehensive, sustainable with expatiation and regulations. Step 2: enhance the development of information technology which can be applied in. Step 3: invest more funds in. Step 4: strengthen the construction of information infrastructure. Step 5: generate scientific administrative strategy for the information system of. 4.3 User analysis There is another key factor we should consider is user. Normal studies always ignore users views and needs, in fact, on the contrary, users are the center of and their needs are the most important matter. Therefore, user study and user analysis is also an important approach to check out weather value could be realized. Actually, the ecosystem contains evaluation which is a kind of user analysis. 5 CONCLUSION This article provides a preliminary study on the approaches of value realization of by literature survey and information ecosystem method. As a hot research spot in Library and Information Science, there are many researched related to, however, it s still lack of theoretical foundation and empirical study. In order to make a contribution to the theoretical 132

8 foundation of, we try to use a mixed research methods in this paper. During a theoretical analysis, we confirm the value system of that contains 16 indexes, and, we create the framework of ecosystem and its impact factors. At last, we propose the approaches to realize the values of. However, is a new and vigorous area which contains obviously disciplinary attribution. So, we must pay more efforts in this area and make it better. REFERENCES Alexopoulos, C., Loukis, E., & Charalabidis, Y. (2016). A methodology for determining the value generation mechanism and the improvement priorities of open government data systems. Computer Science & Information Systems, 1-1. Attard, J., Orlandi, F., & Auer, S. (2016). Value creation on open government data Attard, J., Orlandi, F., Scerri, S., & Auer, S. (2015). A systematic review of open government data initiatives. Government Information Quarterly,32(4), Charalabidis Y, Alexopoulos C, Loukis E. A taxonomy of open government data research areas and topics[j]. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 2016, 26(1-2): Charalabidis, Y., Loukis, E., & Alexopoulos, C. (2014). Evaluating Second Generation Open Government Data Infrastructures Using Value Models. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp ). IEEE Computer Society. Charalabidis, Y., Loukis, E., & Alexopoulos, C. (2014). Evaluating Second Generation Open Government Data Infrastructures Using Value Models. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp ). IEEE Computer Society. Ding, L., Lebo, T., Erickson, J. S., Difranzo, D., Williams, G. T., & Li, X., et al. (2011). Twc logd: a portal for linked open government data ecosystems. Web Semantics Science Services & Agents on the World Wide Web, 9(3), Elliot, Mackey, M. /., O Shea, E. /., Tudor, S. /., Spicer, C. /., & Keith. (2016). End user licence to open government data? a simulated penetration attack on two social survey datasets. Journal of Official Statistics, 32(2), Galiotou, E., & Fragkou, P. (2013). Applying linked data technologies to greek open government data: a case study. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 73, Janssen, M., & Kuk, G. (2016). Big and open linked data (bold) in research, policy, and practice. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 26(1-2), Janssen, M., & Zuiderwijk, A. (2014). Infomediary business models for connecting open data providers and users. Social Science Computer Review, 32(5), Lee, Y., Lee, J., & Hwang, Y. (2015). Relating motivation to information and communication technology acceptance. Computers in Human Behavior, 51(PA), Marijn Janssen, Yannis Charalabidis, & Anneke Zuiderwijk. (2012). Benefits, adoption barriers and myths of open data and open government.information Systems Management, 29(4), Shadbolt, N., O'Hara, K., Bernerslee, T., Gibbins, N., Glaser, H., & Hall, W., et al. (2012). Linked open government data: lessons from data.gov.uk. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 27(3), White House. (2012). Open Government Directive Zuiderwijk, A., Janssen, M., & Dwivedi, Y. K. (2015). Acceptance and use predictors of open data technologies: drawing upon the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. Government Information Quarterly,32(4),