Openly sharing data online is potentially revolutionary for advancement in all domains and scientific research disciplines. Open data provision and use in combination with new Information and Communication Technologies (e.g., new semantic standards, increasing computing power, increasing/cheaper data-storage capacity) now offer tremendous opportunities. For instance, sharing data may lead to increased citations and visibility of researchers, increased accountability and transparency of governments, and fairer and more transparent production processes of companies. And using open data, policy makers may make more informed decisions, researchers can obtain new insights by analysing and combining huge amounts of data and by testing new hypotheses, and companies can develop useful applications and services.
By openly sharing relevant data and reusing this data to obtain valuable insights, we can develop better solutions for global, societal challenges. Global societal problems such as climate change, migration, mobility, and the energy transition require the collaboration of various research disciplines to investigate appropriate solutions. By combining insights derived from open government, research, business, and citizen data from different disciplines and domains, researchers can learn from each other and derive new, innovative insights critical for solving societal problems.
Such practices, however, require more relevant data to be made publicly available and the implementation of mechanisms to make this data better findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Currently, there are many reasons to be reluctant with openly sharing and using data. For example, governmental organizations may find it too time-consuming to share their data or they do not know how to do this, researchers may fear the loss of publishing opportunities and companies may fear losing their competitive advantage. Reasons for not using available open data may be citizens’ lack of skills in data use, researchers finding that the data is of too low data quality and journalists not being able to find the data they need since open data platforms are fragmented.
Researchers at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management investigate various open data-related topics (see Tab People and Research), adopting a socio-technical, multi-actor and interdisciplinary perspective. From a socio-technical perspective, we combine insights from the engineering sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. From a multi-actor perspective, we conduct research on open data and data sharing involving various actors, such as governments, companies, and citizens. And from an interdisciplinary perspective, we examine open data and data sharing research in the context of different scientific disciplines, domains and industries.