A layered architecture for open data: Design, implementation and experiences

In order to increase transparency, Public Administrations (PAs) have their own portals to publish Open Data, resulting in more openness, reduced corruption and improved services. Open Data (OD) initiatives are achieving less citizens' engagement than expected. Hence, the need to find other ways and services to obtain more engagement and extract value from OD. This paper introduces an architectural model to design software platforms with the objective to increase public value through collective participation of citizens, public administrations and key stakeholders. The architectural model originates from the Data-Information-Knowledge hierarchy, where greater value is at the top of the pyramid, in information and knowledge gathered from data. Thus, the architectural model adds the collaborative and presentation layers to the classical data layer; citizens, public administrations, and stakeholders form groups of interests to understand, reason and interpret Open Data to gather information and generate knowledge that will be communicated to the general audience over Internet, thus, increasing public value. The paper describes three platform instances: the ROUTE-TO-PA ecosystem, the data.world, and DKAN, which functionalities can be mapped onto the architectural model proposed in the paper. Furthermore, the paper describes HETOR, a concreate experience of exploitation of the architectural model and the ROUTE-TO-PA ecosystem with groups of students and associations of citizens, who collaborated together to ultimately generate new knowledge for Cultural Heritage to be communicated over Internet through blog posts.