Open Data Issues

Open data is published with the intent for anyone to use the data for any legal purpose. This includes companies who wish to commercialise the data directly or indirectly. In the UK, most open data is published by government organisations under the Open Government Licence. Having spent over half a decade working with open data, we have seen two frequent licence related issues: licence ambiguity and closed open data.

Licence Ambiguity

It is not always clear how much of a published dataset is licensed under an open licence. Even when the open licence is presented prominently on the same page as the dataset, there are often specific data files that are licensed under different terms. This can lead to confusion about how open the data is, and in the worst case, can result in...

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