The first report of the Use Case Observatory is out!
 

The first report on ‘The Use Case Observatory’
[https://data.europa.eu/en/doc/use-case-observatory-3-year-monitoring-30-reuse-cases-understand-economic-governmental-social] is
now available on the data.europa.eu
[https://data.europa.eu/en/academy/stories-use-case-observatory]. 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
[https://data.europa.eu/en/impact-studies/open-data-maturity], EU
Datathon [https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eudatathon] and data.europa.eu
use case repository
[https://data.europa.eu/en/publications/use-cases]. They were grouped
according to the four dimensions of open data impact, used also in the
Open Data Maturity studies
[https://data.europa.eu/en/impact-studies/open-data-maturity]:
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’
[https://data.europa.eu/en/academy/stories-use-case-observatory] 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 [https://www.openpolis.it/], Integreat
[https://integreat-app.de/en/about-us/], ANP [https://www.anp.nl/] and
OpenFoodFacts [https://world.openfoodfacts.org/], 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
[https://data.europa.eu/en/academy/stories-use-case-observatory].

 

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Publication Date/Time
2022-11-25T08:00:00+00:00
Discover our research project that follows 30 open data reuse cases
over 3 years