Opening Italian Data

Opening Italian Data
Status: 
concluded
Period: 
January 2011 - January 2016
Funding: 
about 40,000 € in the academic year 2012/2013
Funding organization: 

Regione Piemonte

Person(s) in charge: 

Federico Morando (Nexa project manager)

Executive summary: 

The Nexa Center supports Regione Piemonte, and other public administrations, in its open government data projects. Moreover, the support that the Nexa Center offered to the Italian Ministry of Education, Research and University (MIUR) contributed to an important amendment of the Italian Code of Digital Administration (CAD) that now includes an “open by default” clause for public sector information.

Background: 

The Nexa Center supports the open data related projects of Regione Piemonte since 2009, i.e., since the launch of the first Italian Open Data portal, http://dati.piemonte.it.

During the academic year 2012/2013, Nexa fellow Lorenzo Benussi worked as consultant for the Ministry of Innovation and Research, prof. Profumo, to contribute to the Italian Digital Agenda. This increased the Nexa Center interactions also with the national government.

Objectives: 

Last Update: 2014-02-06; Next Expected Update: 2015-03-31

The Center supports cutting-edge initiatives in this domain with the twofold objective of promoting socially beneficial initiatives and gathering experience, case studies and empirical evidence to feed our research on public sector information.

The policy support activity of the Center in this domain also contributes to the overall funding strategy of Nexa, since this domain constitutes to core of the collaboration between the Center and Regione Piemonte, as well as other public administrations and private organisations.

Results: 

Last Update: 2013-12-06; Next Expected Update: 2015-03-31

During the last period, the Nexa Center continued contributing to the Open Data strategy of the Piedmont Regione, e.g. participating in the drafting of position papers listing policy priorities in that arena. Moreover, the Nexa Center started supporting - on a pro bono basis, the Open Data initiative of the Alessandria Municipality, focusing its effort on the open disclosure of accounting data.

Previously, the Nexa Center was one of the main drafters of the by-laws (regulations and official guidelines) implementing the open data law of Regione Piemonte (Regional Law n. 24 of the December 23, 2011): D.G.R. 22-4687 of October 8, 2012. The main innovation introduced by these guidelines is arguably a formal procedure to request data (and possibly fill a complaint), which is now online at http://www.regione.piemonte.it/urp/opendata/.

Thanks to Art. 52 of the CAD, all the data published by an Italian public sector body without an express license are to be considered open data. And open data are defined by Art. 68 as data which are reusable by anybody, included for commercial purposes, accessible online in open and machine readable formats, and available for free or at marginal cost.

Related Publications:
Nexa Center for Internet & Society
22 November 2013
Consultation on guidelines on recommended standard licences, datasets and charging for the re-use of public sector information
Federico Morando, Raimondo Iemma, Simone Basso
21 November 2013
Internet Policy Review
Federico Morando
30 January 2013
Italian Journal of Library and Information Science
Vetrò Antonio; Torchiano Marco
29/01/2016