The study shows that Germany publishes a lot of data in comparison to Denmark, France and the United Kingdom, but is not yet able to exploit its potential sufficiently. Among the data published in the German open data portal, there are also a lot of image data and proprietary or non-machine-readable data formats that are difficult to reuse. With 19 %, Germany provides significantly more image formats than Denmark (1 %), France (1 %) and the United Kingdom (8 %). Our analysis of 100 open data stakeholders shows that different initiatives can promote open government data in those four countries. In Germany, there are several civil society organizations, foundations and associations, that are driving the topic forward.
Successful open data countries in Europe have anchored open government data high on their political agenda and are engaged in strong public relations work. This underlines the importance of open government data and gives open data stakeholders political backing for their work. The dissemination of applications that have been developed based on open government data makes the potential of open data visible and more tangible for society. By publishing success stories of data provision, data providers get a stage for their work, which incentivizes them to improve their data quality and quantity.
To make data more effective, leading open data countries are aligning data provision with user needs. As knowledge about the user group is generally lost through open data, regular exchange between data providers and data users as well as with business associations is of crucial importance. User feedback makes it possible to improve data access and identify data sets with high and broad demand.
