The Unexploitable Smartness of Open Data

Abstract

The paper identifies a contradiction between data openness and economic value, possibly hiding a ‘market failure’ requiring a more active intervention from the public hand. Though the sheer quantity of data available for free usage is steadily increasing worldwide, its average quality usually stays well below the minimum threshold required for value creation. In contrast, there is now growing evidence that the use of data has enormous potential for the economy and society, including research and the progress of science. Unfortunately, useful datasets are usually locked in and when actually made accessible, suffer from the same limitations mentioned before. Maybe the time is ripe to undervalue the generalized disclosure of government data in favor of an appropriately incentivized and targeted creation of actionable bases of new IT applications. We present four cases touching upon the issues and potentials of service design, urban innovation, and data-related policies. We identify two possible ways of tackling the highlighted market failure: direct subsidies to government bodies or agencies engaged in disclosing their own datasets and keeping them clean and accessible over time or new regulations that establish more productive data ecosystems, rewarding knowledge creation rather than mere data ownership.