OPEN DATA FOR THE MASSES: Unleashing Personal Data into the Wild

摘要

In these years the public administration is undergoing a deep transformation, driven by a greater demand for transparency and efficiency in a participative framework involving nonprofit organizations, businesses, and citizens, with the modern network infrastructures as a common medium. The Open Data movement is considered to be one of the keys of this change. In this position paper we argue that the work done so far in the Open Data field, i.e. offering massive public datasets, is just a preliminary answer. We argue that a few open standards concerning online authorization, access control, and data exportation, are emerging; these standards, if adopted by the public administration (but also business companies and any other organization), will trigger the release of a much wider and more useful wave of open data, able to sustain a new generation of helpful online personalized services, based on personal data whose ownership is given back to individual people.