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Open Data Selection and Publication: An Application for Universities

Abstract:

At present, the debate on the open data is focused on opening data taking into account the transparency law and the data protection law of each country. However, compliance with these laws does not ensure that value is generated from open data, since reusing community is not considered from the very beginning of the open data process. Actually, one of the most important benefits of open data is achieved when it is reused to create value-added IT products and services. Additionally, it must be taken into account that publishing data has a cost in terms of hardware, software and human resources. Therefore, in addition to complying with legislation, it is necessary to know which data from the origin of an institution would be the most used to generate value for society in order to select them for openness and which data can be published in open with an acceptable cost-benefit ratio. Recent proposals involve the reusing collective in the selection of the data sets to be opened, but unfortunately, as far as we know, no formal scientifically based method is used for this task, so in practice publication is based on the available data sets and whether it is feasible to publish them without taking into account the priorities of the reusing community. In this article it is proposed to alleviate this problem by applying the Fuzzy Delphi methodology in order to determine which data sets are most likely to be reused and which data sets will have an assumable cost for publication in order to proceed, therefore, to their opening. The article also establishes a specific case of application in the field of Ecuadorian universities, which are in a constant process of innovation and seek the participation and collaboration of students and the university community in general, to generate value-added IT products and services through the opening of their data sets.