'There's no such thing as raw data'

Abstract

Under the UK government's open government data (OGD) initiative, departments have been encouraged to make non-personal government held datasets available online under open licenses and in standard formats, enabling the re-use of data to support transparency and accountability, improved public services and innovation and economic growth. This policy covers a wide range of government datasets, from core reference data and regularly collected performance indicators, to one-off research commissioned to support policy making. In arguments for open data, government datasets are commonly treated as if they are pre-existing artifacts waiting to be transferred from their current locations locked away on government hard drives, to public availability on websites and data-portals. However, in practice, many datasets are constructed in the process of being opened: whether as combinations of source material, or as derivative extracts of internal data systems.