The first report of the Use Case Observatory is out!
The first report on ‘The Use Case Observatory’ is now available on the data.europa.eu. This research tracks 30 open data reuse cases from 2022 to 2025 with the goal of assessing how open data creates impact, sharing the challenges and successes of reuse, and contributing to the debate on open data impact assessment methodology.
The 30 use cases for the study were selected from over 600 reuse cases collected from the EU Open Data Maturity assessments, EU Datathon and data.europa.eu use case repository. They were grouped according to the four dimensions of open data impact, used also in the Open Data Maturity studies: economic, governmental, social and environmental.
Reuse cases with an economic impact show how open data is used to help companies identify promising public procurement tenders and apply for jobs and further professional opportunities. The governmental impact reuse cases prove that open data can increase the transparency of political processes and strengthen democracy. As part of the social impact domain, reuse cases in this first report use open data to improve public health and incentivise a more inclusive society. Finally, several reuse cases create an environmental impact by monitoring air quality and supporting the preservation of forests.
Most reuse cases report to measure their impact with web statistics. Yet, the number of unique visitors or the number of views of a web page only serve as a rough estimate of the impact that is created through open data. Additionally, a challenge in estimating the impact of small and medium-sized enterprise open data reuse cases may arise from the inability to share precise information about their revenue or number of clients, as competitors could use that information to their advantage. Finally, another common challenge seems to be receiving appropriate funding to scale up the services offered and realise the impact and goals planned for the future.
Overall, this first report highlights the power of open data reuse, but also shows the need to further unlock the potential of open data, allowing its reuse to have a clear impact on our economy, government, society and environment. This requires supporting the community of reusers in identifying financial opportunities, but also helping them gain a better understanding of how open data impact is created and measured.
The first report's findings will act as a basis for a second and third analysis, which will be concerned with assessing the progress of the 30 selected reuse cases from one year to another. The next two reports will be published in 2024 and 2025, respectively.
A webinar ‘Stories from the Use Case Observatory – Volume I’ was hosted by data.europa academy on 7 October 2022 to launch the first report and discuss its insights. During the webinar, four participants, Openpolis, Integreat, ANP and OpenFoodFacts, presented their respective reuse cases and shared their views on opportunities and challenges to come. You can watch the recording and consult the slides of the session on the dedicated data.europa academy page.
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