Open Data Issues

Open data is published with the intent for anyone to use the data for any legal purpose. This includes companies who wish to commercialise the data directly or indirectly. In the UK, most open data is published by government organisations under the Open Government Licence. Having spent over half a decade working with open data, we have seen two frequent licence related issues: licence ambiguity and closed open data.

Licence Ambiguity

It is not always clear how much of a published dataset is licensed under an open licence. Even when the open licence is presented prominently on the same page as the dataset, there are often specific data files that are licensed under different terms. This can lead to confusion about how open the data is, and in the worst case, can result in copyright and intellectual property infringements with legal consequences.

Closed Open Data

The closing of open data is a common practice. Many data aggregators use open data to produce high-value derivative datasets and re-license this under terms that make the data proprietary. The terms are often restrictive enough to prevent several data re-use scenarios, especially value-added data resale. Data resellers are then forced to seek out the original raw data and apply similar transformations to achieve the same result. The time and effort that is wasted on re-inventing the wheel, rather than building on what already exists, is both inefficient and stifling.

Use Our Open Data Services

Every Dataset is Openly Licensed

Through more than half a decade of research and development, we have crafted a sustainable business model that allows us to keep our datasets open and available to all. We ensure that each of our datasets are licensed under a single Open Database Licence. We are very much of the opinion that open data should be kept open, even after value has been added. This allows individuals, non-government organisations (NGOs), start-ups, small to medium enterprises (SMEs), and large enterprises to unlock value in the data more quickly, and innovate using a common set of base data. Keeping the data open gives it the broadest possible reach, impact, and value.

The places where we prominently surface licensing information include the following:

• Open Data Blend Dataset UI
  • Per data file group
  • Per data row in dimension/lookup tables
• Open Data Blend Dataset API
  • Per data file
  • Per data row in dimension/lookup tables

Data that is derived from interactive queries against the Open Data Blend Analytics Model is licensed under the same terms as the Open Data Blend Datasets.

Learn more about the Open Database Licence.

Alternative Licence for Data Resellers

Data resellers typically curate datasets, add value through domain knowledge, and then sell the derivative data to their customers. The share-alike requirement of the Open Database Licence does not work for this business model, so we created the Open Data Blend Database Licence with this usage scenario in mind. This alternative licence grants you rights to publicly share any data that you derive from our datasets without this needing to be licensed under the Open Database Licence. The option to use our alternative licence comes with our Commercial subscription.

If you have a great idea for directly commercialising our datasets (e.g. by producing value-added derivative data), you can start a Commercial subscription today. The monthly cost is less than the average daily rate for a senior data engineer, and it includes access to our interactive analytical data model, a large number of data file requests per month, email support, and up-time SLAs.

Learn more about the Open Data Blend Database Licence.

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Blog hero image by FLY:D on Unsplash.