How can we acquire the Open Data of the Public Administration?
DATA-DRIVEN INNOVATION
The expression Data-Driven Innovation identifies an economic policy linked to the use of data and statistics to improve or foster the creation of new products, processes, organisational systems, or markets; data relating not only to the activities and habits of online users but also to the whole mass of data collected daily by wearable devices, mobile phones, smart machines, industrial machines, video surveillance systems as well as by public administrations.
In reality, the implementation of a development policy linked to the analysis and use of data cannot be separated from the provision of data held by public administrations, the so-called Open Data.
On the development of the Open Data re-use policy we have, let us now briefly analyse what types of licenses may be used for making data available.
THE PRINCIPLE OF FREE DATA
The cardinal principle that permeates the entire Open Data discipline, also confirmed by the recent Directive 2019/1024, is that of the gratuitousness of data; the information managed by public administrations for their institutional purposes cannot be treated as assets of the same public administrations from which to derive a profit, hence the request for a possible fee for their re-use is justified only within the limits of the need to cover the costs incurred for reproducing, making available and disseminating the data. The possible cost must therefore only be linked to the quality of the service rendered or to the possibility to access the data in an open format.
OPEN DATA BY DEFAULT
Article 52 of the CAD (Digital Administration Italian Code) states that "data and documents that the owner administrations publish without the express adoption of a license shall be deemed to be released as open data".
Based on this principle, when an administration decides to publish a piece of data, it is assumed that that data can be freely used without any restrictions.
Administrations may provide for the use of licenses only if this is necessary to comply with other regulations, such as the GDPR, the protection of trade and industrial secrets, and in any case giving reasons for the choice.
TYPES OF LICENSES
The 2017 AgID (Agency for Digital Italy) guidelines indicates certain types of standard licenses, which stipulate that data made available in open format by Public Administrations can be licensed with a request to attribute the authorship of the data and, possibly, with a request to re-share the data, again in open format.
Licenses that require indicating the authorship of the data allow the licensee to copy, distribute and expose the data to the public as well as to modify it even for commercial purposes, with the only obligation being to indicate the authorship of the data, providing a link to the license and indicating any modifications made; these are the so-called Creative Commons - Attribution (CC-BY) licenses. The licensee must indicate the administration owning the rights, the type of document that has been reused, and the author of any modifications (mashups) so as not to create confusion concerning the origin of the document.
Licenses that also require the re-sharing of processed data in open format allow the reuse of data even for commercial purposes provided that the distribution of any derivative works follows the identical license that governs the source data.
Two types of national licenses have been developed in Italy:
Finally, in order to allow the real use of significant masses of data, public administrations must make available quality data that are clear, up-to-date, precise, and comprehensible (principles sanctioned internationally by the G8 Open Data Charter).