The Relevance of Open Data Principles for the Web of Data

Abstract

Open data has been improving both publishing platforms and the consumers-oriented process over the years, providing better openness policies and transparency. Although organizations have tried to open their data, the enrichment of their resources through the Web of Data has been decreasing. Linked data has been suffering from notable difficulties in different stages of its life cycle, becoming over the years less attractive to users. According to that, we decided to explore how the lack of some opening requirements affects the decline of the Web of Data. This paper presents the Web of Data radiography, analyzing the governmental domain as a case study. The results indicate that it is necessary to strengthen the data opening process to improve resource enrichment on the Web and have better datasets. These improvements describe that open data must be public, accessible (in machine-readable formats), described (use of robust, granular metadata), reusable (made available under an open license), complete (published in primary forms), and timely (preserve the value of the data). The implementation of these characteristics would enhance the availability and reuse of datasets. Besides, organizations must understand that opening and enriching their data require a completely new approach, and they have to pay special attention and control to this project, generally by putting money, the commitment by management at all levels, and lots of time. On the contrary, given the magnitude of availability and reuse problems identified in the opening and enrichment data process, it is believed that the Web of Data model would inevitably lose the interest it aroused at the beginning if not addressed immediately by data quality, openness, and enrichment issues. Besides, its use would be restricted to a few particular niches or would even disappear altogether.