Methodologies and Best Practices for Open Data Publication

Publication and reuse of machine-readable data on the Web is one of the current trends in data management that is mainly manifested by the Open Data movement. This movement is especially strong in the government and public sector domain where many Open Government Data initiatives have been launched in a large number of countries across the globe. In the European Union the recent update of the PSI Directive aims at fostering the reuse of data and information held by the public sector bodies by promoting publication of data in open machine-readable formats together with the relevant metadata. Even though the support of governments and the EU to Open Data and PSI reuse seems to be strong, public sector bodies are facing many challenges when publishing Open Government Data and the desired reuse is not always evident. In order to overcome these challenges Open (Government) Data publication methodologies are being proposed and the best practices in this domain are being formulated. In this paper we discuss the current challenges related to the OGD publication and reuse, we provide an overview of the existing methodologies and the best practices for publication of Open Government Data, we present an OGP publication methodology developed in the COMSODE project.