Overview

Open Data is data that anyone can access, use, or share and when used well it can be extremely powerful. It enables businesses, citizens, developers, and researchers to harness resources that can make crucial improvements to their communities and the economy. It can also help with the development of new products and services, improve business efficiency and create economic value.

Open Data supports public oversight of governments and helps reduce corruption by enabling greater transparency. For instance, Open Data makes it easier to monitor government activities, such as tracking public budget expenditures and impacts.

This course provides new insight into the history of Open Data, its pros and cons, business cases and business models related to publishing and using Open Data.

Over the course of the day, you will learn

• What open data is, its benefits and opportunities
• Case studies of successful open data projects
• How to minimise risks by understanding licensing and certificates
• How to discover and use open data

Who is this for?

Employees from private companies, third-sector organisations and government departments. Previous participants have included: decision makers, managers, civil servants, researchers, policy advisors, journalists, students, strategists, data owners and publishers.

Course Contents

Day 1 

Discovering Open Data

• Define open data
• Explain how cost and availability are key aspects of open
• Evaluate how to customise the definition of open data for different communities and requirements
• Differentiate between human and machine readable data

Day 2

The Benefits of Working with Open Data

• Describe the benefits of working with open data
• Draw on successful case studies of open data use and publishing
• Explain how open data sits in the current economic climate
• Evaluate the success of open data projects and communities

Day 3

Copyright, Licensing and Open Data

• Describe how copyright and licensing relate to open data
• Identify instances of open licences and effective application
• Build and use open licences
• Manage third-party data and sub-licensing

Day 4

Making Data Usable

• Use Open Data Certificates to assess the usability of open data
• Apply the five stars of linked open data to analyse technical quality of data
• Describe the importance of persistent identifiers for data

Day 5

Getting Hands-On with Open Data

• Discover a number of open datasets
• Evaluate the usability of an existing open dataset
• Identify a number of errors that exist in data
• Clean a dataset
• Validate data to assess usability
• Suggest a number of ways to improve the publication of open data