Five-star open data

• Suggested by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the WWW) as a deployment scheme for open data.
• Stars are awarded according to the state of open data from data released under an open license to data linked to other datasets.
• Provides a good framework for assessing where you are in terms of opening your data and what steps to take in order to move forward.
• https://5stardata.info/en/

☆ data

Data is available (in whatever format) under an open license

Costs [-] and benefits [+]

As a consumer...

• [+] You can look, print, and download data.
• [+] You can share data with others.
• [-] If data is locked-up in a non machine-readable format (pdf, doc, jpeg), it’s hard to get data out of the document.

As a publisher...

• [+] It’s simple to publish.

☆☆ data

Data is available as structured, machine-readable data (e.g. Excel instead of PDFs)

Costs [-] and benefits [+]

As a consumer...

• [+] You can do all you can with ☆ data.
• [+] You can directly process the data or export it to another structured format.
• [-] You might need proprietary software to work with data.

As a publisher...

• [+] It’s still simple to publish.

☆☆☆ data

Data is available in a non-proprietary open format (e.g. CSV instead of Excel)

Costs [-] and benefits [+]

As a consumer...

• [+] You can do all you can with ☆☆ data.
• [+] You can manipulate the data in any way you like without the need for proprietary software.

As a publisher...

• [+] It’s still relatively simple to publish.
• [-] You will need to convert your data from proprietary formats to open formats.

☆☆☆☆ data

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is used to identify things

Costs [-] and benefits [+]

As a consumer...

• [+] You can do all you can with ☆☆☆ data.
• [+] You can link, bookmark, and reuse parts of the data since it is now data in the web.
• [-] Understanding the structure of W3C standards such as RDF can be more complicated than tables and spreadsheets.

As a publisher...

• [+] Other publishers can link to your data.
• [+] More granular control over your data.
• [-] You need to assign URIs to data items and think about how best to represent them.
• [-] You need to understand the structure of W3C standards.

☆☆☆☆☆ data

Data is linked to other data in order to provide context

Costs [-] and benefits [+]

As a consumer...

• [+] You can do all you can with ☆☆☆☆ data.
• [+] You can discover other related data easier.
• [-] Possibility for broken links.

As a publisher...

• [+] Your data is more discoverable.
• [+] The value of your data grows as the network of data attached to it also grows.
• [-] You need to invest resources to link your data with other data and prevent link rot.