Regina VARNIENĖ-JANSSEN and Jūratė KUPRIENĖ (Vilnius University)
The presentation is devoted to one of the most urgent issues of today’s information policy: open data and reuse of public sector’s information. It builds upon research done by the authors, which had the purpose to identify requirements for reusing library data and information as well as on the experience of libraries in various countries in their endeavours to achieve interoperability of data with the Semantic Web. The phenomenological and methodological approach applied in the research focuses not so much on the investigation of the phenomenon itself as on its importance predetermined by the activity of the human consciousness. In our research, we attempted to find out commonalities in individual experiences gained when facing this phenomenon. We identified three levels of the interpretation of the perception of this phenomenon. The first level of the interpretation of the perception of open data is based on the analysis of strategic documents of the EU Parliament and Council and Lithuania, which envisage the potential of opening up of data and their potential benefits as well as set the road map for such opening up. The presentation highlights fundamental aspects of the updated Directive on Open Data and Reuse of Public Sector Information of the EU Parliament and Council, which entered into force on 17 July this year. The second level of the interpretation of the perception of open data is based on the analysis of the requirements set for the description of open data, their publication, and their interoperability within the Semantic Web. The main of such requirements are application of Resource Description Framework (RDF) and principles set by Tim Berners-Lee. The third level is based on the analysis of experiences by researchers from various countries, including the authors of this presentation, gained when facing the phenomenon of open data. The presentation discusses best practice examples from various countries. The reasoning applied in the research ensures the transition from separateness and individual and subjective knowledge to the level of a generalised conceptual description of reality and allows drawing generalised conclusions.