Balancing control, usability and visibility of linked open government data to create public value

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM-02-2018-0062
• Date: 08 July 2019
• Published date: 08 July 2019
• Pages: 451-466
• Author: Benedikt Simon Hitz-Gamper,Oliver Neumann,Matthias Stürmer
• Subject Matter: Public policy & environmental management

Balancing control, usability

and visibility of linked

open government data

to create public value

Benedikt Simon Hitz-Gamper, Oliver Neumann and Matthias Stürmer

Institute of Information Systems, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

Abstract

Purpose –Linked data is a technical standard to structure complex information and relate independent sets

of data. Recently, governments have started to use this technology for bridging separated data “(silos)”by

launching linked open government data (LOGD) portals. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of

LOGD as a smart technology and strategy to create public value. This is achieved by enhancing the usability

and visibility of open data provided by public organizations.

Design/methodology/approach –In this study, three different LOGD governance modes are deduced:

public agencies could release linked data via a dedicated triple store, via a shared triple store or via an open

knowledge base. Each of these modes has different effects on usability and visibility of open data. Selected

case studies illustrate the actual use of these three governance modes.

Findings –According to this study, LOGD governance modes present a trade-off between retaining control

over governmental data and potentially gaining public value by the increased use of open data by citizens.

Originality/value –This study provides recommendations for public sector organizations for the

development of their data publishing strategy to balance control, usability and visibility considering also the

growing popularity of open knowledge bases such as Wikidata.

Keywords Linked data, Open data, Public value, Data governance, Wikidata, Linked open government data

Paper type Research paper

1. Open data and public value

In recent years, a growing adoption of open government data (OGD) policies can be

observed (Wang and Lo, 2016), and many governments including those of the USA, EU and

UK have launched their own OGD portals online. OGD is part of the larger open data

movement, which promotes the idea that non-personal and not security related data should

be made available to everyone free of charge and restrictions(Open Data Handbook, http://

opendatahandbook.org/guide/en/what-is-open-data). Partly, this movement is the result of

increasing pressure on governments to become more transparent (Welch and Wong, 2001).

As government is one of the principal producers and collectors of data in a vast array of

domains, government data are often viewed as a valuable resource offering great

opportunities to stakeholders if it is openly available. Most notably, several scholars have

argued that the creation of public value is one of these opportunities, if not the most

important one (Attard et al., 2016; Hui and Hayllar, 2010; Lee and Kwak, 2012; Zuiderwijk

and Janssen, 2014) and many practitioners mention the creation of public value as one of the

key goals of open data initiatives ( Janssen et al., 2012).

Generally, the promise of OGD is that it has a positive impact on society in four pivotal

areas: government transparency and accountability, citizen inclusion and empowerment,

government efficiency and effectiveness, and economic growth (Davies, 2013). Although,

these effects of OGD have not been tested systematically and empirically (Safarov et al.,

2017), there is evidence of OGD impact on the public sphere (de Kool and Bekkers, 2016;

Lourenço, 2016). As such, the promises of OGD agree with many definitions of public value.

Bryson et al. (2014), for instance, define public value as “producing what is either valued

by the public, is good for the public […], or both, as assessed against various public

International Journal of Public

Sector Management

Vol. 32 No. 5, 2019

pp. 451-466

© Emerald PublishingLimited

0951-3558

DOI 10.1108/IJPSM-02-2018-0062

Received 28 February 2018

Revised 14 October 2018

19 December 2018

Accepted 24 January 2019

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/0951-3558.htm

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Linked open

government

data

value criteria.”Benington and Moore (2010) emphasize that public value means, “first, what

the public values,”focusing on “individual interests […] of current users”and, “second,

what adds value to the public sphere,”focusing “on the longer term public good, including

the needs of generations to come.”Note that both of these definitions ascribe considerable

interpretative power to the public when it comes to determining the public value of a

phenomenon, meaning that how the public perceives the impact of government activities is

key to whether they create public value or not. Additionally, to allow OGD to create public

value, the data needs to be reliable and valid and it should enable citizens to create

something they deem valuable (Harrison et al., 2012).

Importantly, the impact of OGD in the four pivotal areas named above is not an

immediate result of making government data public, because OGD does not have any value

in itself ( Janssen et al., 2012). Instead, making an impact requires external actors to invest

time and resources into working with OGD, for instance by data interlinking, visualization,

analysis or interpretation (Attard et al., 2016) and by eventually producing innovation

(Lakomaa and Kallberg, 2013) and other forms of impact (Stuermer and Dapp, 2016). Jetzek

(2016) mentions sharing and market mechanisms as the two principal ways of generating

value by means of open data. To this end, OGD platforms and data formats need to be

designed in a way enabling external actors to easily access, combine and use the data

provided, even if it originates from multiple different public (and private) organizations.

In addition, concerns about privacy and “(big brother)”surveillance threats are relevant

in the context of OGD. Janssen and van den Hoven (2015) point out that both transparency

and privacy are important values of governments. In their terminology big and open linked

data (abbreviated as BOLD) presents new challenges to administrative organizations

providing transparency within governmental activities while ensuring the privacy of

its citizens.

Multiple analyses of existing OGD portals have illustrated that the use of OGD is often

hampered by the multitude of different data formats and the lack of machine readability of

the data (Neumaier et al., 2016; Smith and Sandberg, 2018; Umbrich et al., 2015).

Additionally, Zuiderwijk, Janssen, Choenni, Meijer and Alibaks (2012) identified ten key

impediments of public value generation, focusing on the perspective of the user. According

to these authors, availability and access, findability, usability, understandability, quality,

linking and combining data, comparability and compatibility, metadata, interaction with the

data provider, and opening and uploading are key issues hampering public value generation

by users. So, merely opening to the public the data “(silos),”which many public

organizations maintain is, in many cases, insufficient to foster the creation of public value.

While opening data to the public certainly enhances visibility of the data and thereby

government transparency, the data within individual open data “(silos)”are often difficult to

browse, query and connect (Shadbolt et al., 2012) due to a lack of common unique identifiers

of data records and commonly used vocabularies and ontologies. Thus, the use of such open

data remains limited, hampering the possibilities of external actors to interact with the data

and leverage their public value potential (Heath, 2008). In our view, this last aspect and

particularly its connection to linked data has thus far been widely overlooked in the

literature on OGD, constituting a substantial gap in research.

In this study, alternatives are explored regarding how public organizations can improve

the way they provide open data to the public, enhancing both visibility and usability and

thereby maximizing their potential to create public value. To this end, a user’s perspective is

adopted, heeding the call by Janssen et al. (2012). The focus lies on how OGD “(silos)”can be

bridged by the use of linked open government data (LOGD) (Shadbolt et al., 2012) as an

overlap of government data, open data and linked data (see Figure 1).

LOGD is already in use for several years in the public sector around the world

(Ding et al., 2012). Starting in the UK the government has integrated LOGD into its OGD

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