Knowledge & opinion

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From practical tips for publishing open data to inspiring accounts of how open data has changed lives, we’re publishing new blogs all the time.

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Blog 26/08/2015
Aim to be boring: lessons for data infrastructure
- Data infrastructure
Peter Wells, the ODI’s Director of Public Policy, shares why data infrastructure should be boring and invisible, and why we are arguing for greater investment and focus on it
Blog, Guides 06/08/2015
Five stages of data grief
- Data infrastructure
- Data publishing and use
- Jeni Tennison
The ODI has developed a new approach for organisations to identify and manage data ethics considerations: the Data Ethics Canvas
Blog, News 15/07/2015
Citymapper executive to governments: 'Open more data so we can improve your cities'
- Data infrastructure
- Innovation
- Anna Scott
The size and number of businesses built on open data is growing every year. Citymapper is one of the best-known open data success stories
Case study 15/07/2015

Peer-to-peer lending businesses lead the way in opening up financial data A comprehensive snapshot of the UK’s peer-to-peer lending market
Blog 25/06/2015
How can open data help improve healthcare?
- Health and physical activity
We look at six healthcare-related datasets that are published as open data
Blog 19/06/2015
Beyond the smart city: why our needs extend beyond where we live
- Agriculture and food
- Cities
How can cities and rural areas learn from each other? Our common needs shed light on what really matters in smart programmes: people and planet, says Simon Gough
Reports 31/05/2015
Open data means business
- Innovation
- Sir Nigel Shadbolt
UK innovation across sectors and regions
Reports 27/05/2015
Improving agriculture and nutrition with open data
- Agriculture and food
How open data in different contexts can enable more effective decision making, create innovation and promote transparency
Reports 28/04/2015

How to prioritise open data to drive global development With limited resources, how do we decide what data to release?
Article 22/04/2015

New crop data from Syngenta to allow farmers to increase sustainable productivity New crop data allows farmers to increase sustainable productivity
Reports 31/03/2015

Open Data Maturity Model A way to assess how well an organisation publishes and consumes open data, and identifies actions for improvement
Blog 13/03/2015
Burkina Faso's data revolution: government transition to open data
- Humanitarian response
- Peer networks
- Cities
- Liz Carolan
The Avenue de l’Indépendance in Ouagadougou is home to the neat 2- and 3-storey buildings that house most of Burkina Faso’s government ministries. Halfway down the street this order gives way to the charred remains of what was, until 30 October of last year, the House of Parliament.
Blog, Guides 27/02/2015
How To Use R To Access Data On The Web
- Data publishing and use
- Search and discovery
Analysing or using data without software is incredibly cumbersome if not impossible. Here we show you how you can import data from the web into a tool called R. Reasons why R has become so popular, and continues to grow, are that it’s free, open source, with state-of-the-art practices and a fantastic community.
Case study 05/02/2015
How Aidspan uses open data to track health spending
- Humanitarian response
We explore how Aidspan has been using open data to increase its impact and to provide a series of analysis and visualisation tools to its community, whose role is to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria around the world
Blog, Guides 18/12/2014
What is a CSV? A case study of CSVs on data.gov.uk
- Data publishing and use
- Jeni Tennison
CSV stands for comma-separated values. It is a simple format for tabular data and relatively easy to process. We analysed more than 20,000 links to CSV files on data.gov.uk – only around one third turned out to be machine-readable.
Reports 08/12/2014

Open data roadmap for the UK 2015 Open data is an essential part of modern policy-making.
Case study 30/11/2014
Open data in Macedonia: from legislation to engagement
- Public service design
- Cities
Guides 29/11/2014

White paper: Enhancing open data with identifiers Creating value with identifiers in an open data world
Blog, Case study 30/10/2014

Guest post: Linked data and the future of the web Identifiers are at the heart of how data becomes linked, but not many people know how to use them. The ODI and Thomson Reuters have written a guide to identifier schemes.
Blog, Case study 30/10/2014

Guest post: Linked data and the future of the web Today’s world would have been almost unimaginable then, and the phenomenal growth of the web has been intrinsically linked with many of the technology advances of the past 25 years. It will be no surprise if that continues for the next 25.
Article 27/10/2014

Wendy Hall on open data: ‘It’s a means to an end, not an end in itself
Guides 22/09/2014
How to plan and budget an open data initiative
- Innovation
A guide to support open data leaders in government, and those considering implementing an open data initiative
Guides 31/07/2014

Save the Titanic: Hands-on anonymisation and risk control of publishing open data The transition from personal data into data you can publish
Guides 22/07/2014

Marking up your dataset with DCAT DCAT will simplify the process of certifying your dataset as the application will be able to automatically populate some of the answers for you
Article 04/06/2014

News ODI and MzTEK shortlisted for 35th Arts & Business Awards
Article 11/04/2014

£383k government grant released to create UK open address list The release of significant UK Data Funds will create the UK’s first open address list, bringing together information about the places where people live, work and visit.
Article 24/03/2014

Data as Culture: who really owns our data? unveiling the second Open Data Institute (ODI) Data as Culture exhibition which explores our relationship with surveillance, privacy, and personal data.
Blog 27/02/2014
Fig Data 11 Tips How Handle Big Data R And 1 Bad Pun
- Emerging tech and AI
In our latest project, Show me the Money, we used close to 14 million rows to analyse regional activity of peer-to-peer lending in the UK. Conventional tools such as Excel fail (limited to 1,048,576 rows), which is sometimes taken as the definition of Big Data. Then again, I recently heard one of the leading experts, Ken Cukier, say: “there is no definition of big data”.
Guides 22/01/2014
FAQs - About the ODI
- Sir Nigel Shadbolt
Key questions about the Open Data Institute
Blog 11/01/2014
2014: The year of CSV
- Data publishing and use
- Jeni Tennison
Jeni Tennison’s goal in 2014 was to make it easier for developers to use tabular data
Guides 31/12/2013

What makes data open? The truth around open data
Guides 31/12/2013

Publisher's Guide to the Open Data Rights Statement Vocabulary An introduction to the ODRS vocabulary, and includes a number of worked examples that illustrate how to use the vocabulary to publish rights metadata in a number of different ways
Guides 31/12/2013
Reuser's Guide to Open Data Licensing
- Leigh Dodds
All you need to know about open data licensing
Guides 23/12/2013

Re-user's Guide to the Open Data Rights Statement Vocabulary This guide provides some advice on how to use metadata published in the ODRS vocabulary within your applications to help simplify the process of attributing and citing the sources of your data
Guides 22/12/2013

How will open data affect me? How open can change they way we live our lives
Guides 22/12/2013

Engaging with reusers Explicit community building, engagement and outreach work can help to maximise the value that your data brings to your organisation and to others
Guides 15/12/2013
Publisher's Guide to Open Data Licensing
- Leigh Dodds
What does it mean to license data? What licence should you use? How can you indicate the licence that a dataset is available under? This guide answers these questions
Guides 29/11/2013

The Open Data Consumer Checklist Accessibility, Ownership & Licensing, Form, Quality and Support
Guides 20/10/2013

How to make a business case for open data Four steps to maximise the advantages of opening data
Article 07/10/2013

Power of open data reveals global corporate networks The ODI today welcomed the move by OpenCorporates to release open data visualisations which show the global corporate networks of millions of businesses and the power of open data.
Blog 18/04/2013
A cornerstone for open data: the Postcode Address File
- Sir Nigel Shadbolt
Blog 18/04/2013
PAF decision "flies in the face" of government commitments
- Emma Thwaites
Article 26/01/2013

Glasgow wins £24m boost after recognising the “revolutionary impact” of open data. recognising the “revolutionary impact” of open data.
Blog, Case study 12/06/2012
Prescription Savings Worth Millions Identified by ODI incubated company
- Emma Thwaites
Innovative startups working with NHS doctors and academics have found a simple way to save millions of pounds