The term quot;open dataquot; isgenerally understood to be data that are made available tothe public free of charge, without registration orrestrictive licenses, for any purpose whatsoever (includingcommercial purposes), in electronic, machine-readableformats that ensure data are easy to find, download and use.National Statistics Offices (NSOs) have the potential toplay a pivotal role in the implementation of open datainitiatives.As producers and curators of data, theobjective of making high quality data more accessible andusable is consistent with their guiding principles.NSOsindicate, in research conducted in support of this report,that one of the difficulties they encounter is that thetechnology they use to publish - or electronicallydistribute - data for public use is not compatible with openformats.They also indicate that common software packagesused for open data portals do not accommodate the dataformats and metadata they produce.Two key concerns relatedto data dissemination products are addresses: (1) Can suchproducts designed primarily for NSOs satisfy requirementsfor an open data initiative?; and (2) Can such productsdesigned primarily for open data satisfy the requirements ofNSOs?Furthermore, data reuse, both by data experts and thepublic at large, is key to creating new opportunities andbenefits from government data.The followingrecommendations are made to improve the overall utility ofdata publication platforms to NSOs and the open datacommunity: improve technical documentation; ensure publicApplication Programming Interfaces (APIs) and endpoints areinteroperable; presentation of metadata and Uniform ResourceIdentifiers (URIs) must conform to W3C standards; naturallanguage search and metadata faceting should be standard;structural metadata and hypercube support are core NSOrequirements; dashboards and visualisations are necessaryfor user engagement; and develop data engagement tools forimproving data-quality and reuse.
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