An Account of Research on Open Government Data (2007-2012): A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Open Government Data (OGD) is a government policy that is being increasingly adopted by several countries around the world. Despite its growing acceptance, there are still several difficulties both in making OGD available and ensuring it is used effectively by society. A growing body of knowledge has been produced in the last few years in the e-government scientific community to address these problems. This paper conducts a systematic literature re-view on the question of OGD, which is aimed at outlining a knowledge base of the existing scientific literature on OGD produced in the period 2007-2012 that is available in the on-line databases of relevant scientific societies (ACM, AIS, IEEE). In doing so, the paper provides an overview of this knowledge base, and maps out the different research approaches that are being adopted to study OGD, its geographical scope and the application domain they refer to. The results indicate the need of broadening the geographic coverage of OGD studies and also of deepening the discussion of quality criteria for assessing open data.