Open data are currently a hot topic and are associated with realising ambitions such as a more transparent and efficient government, solving societal problems, and increasing economic value. To describe and monitor the state of open data in countries and organisations, several open data assessment frameworks were developed. Despite high scores in these assessment frameworks, the actual (re)use of open government data (OGD) fails to live up to its expectations. Our review of existing open data assessment frameworks reveals that these only cover parts of the open data ecosystem. We have developed a framework, which assesses open data supply, open data governance, and open data user characteristics holistically. This holistic open data framework assesses the maturity of the open data ecosystem and proves to be a useful tool to indicate which aspects of the open data ecosystem are successful and which aspects require attention. Our initial assessment in the Netherlands indicates that the traditional geographical data perform significantly better than non-geographical data, such as healthcare data. Therefore, open geographical data policies in the Netherlands may provide useful cues for other OGD strategies.

In recent years, there has been an increasing trend of releasing public sector information as open data. Governments worldwide see the potential benefits of opening up their data. The potential benefits are more transparency, increased governmental efficiency and effectiveness, and external benefits, including societal and economic benefits. The private sector also recognizes potential benefits of making their datasets available as open data. One such company is Liander, an energy network administrator in the Netherlands. Liander views open data as a contributing factor to energy conservation. However, to date there has been little research done into the actual effects of open data. This research has developed a monitoring framework to assess the effects of open data, and has applied the framework to Liander’s small-scale energy consumption dataset.

Since 2009, Open Government Data initiatives have been launched worldwide and the concept of open data is gaining momentum. Open data are often associated with realizing ambitions, such as a more transparent and efficient government, solving societal problems and increased economic value. However, between proposing an open data policy and successful implementation are some practicable obstacles, especially for government agencies required to generate sufficient revenue to cover their operating costs, so-called self-funding agencies. With lost revenue due to open data, there is a real risk that the update frequency and the quality of data may suffer or that the open data policy may even have to be reversed. This article has researched the financial effects of open data policies for self-funding agencies on their business model. The article provides some hands-on proposals for self-funding agencies having to implement an open data policy whilst ensuring their long-term sustainability.

Open data portals are web services that serve as a central access point for all government-published open data and can exist at local, regional, national, and international levels. They are an important element of most open data initiatives that have enabled a large amount of government data to be widely available. However, data quantity and quality are not the only aspects that should be considered when publishing data. To improve the reusability of data and to achieve greater impact and benefits from open data, it is important to consider user-oriented aspects of the portal management, discovery, and use of data (e.g., organizing the portal in a user-centric way, providing accurate metadata, using a standardized and open data format, etc.). In this paper, we adopted the metrics proposed by the European Commission to assess compliance of the Croatian Open Data Portal with 10 user-oriented principles that open data portals should implement in terms of sustainability and added value. While the results show the government’s efforts in publishing data, some aspects such as better collaboration with data providers and other data portals, offering different visualization tools, etc. need to be improved to achieve active use and impact.

The 2019 European Open Data Directive identifies geospatial data as data that could have a major impact on human activities (high-value data, HVD) and advocates its provision as open data (OD), i.e., without barriers to access and re-use. Although Croatia has implemented OD policies to support the provision of open data, many geospatial data are still not available, or if available, their level of openness ranks Croatia lower than Slovenia and Serbia on some ranking lists. Benchmarking tools have proven to be a powerful tool in identifying barriers in OD. This paper, therefore, benchmarks the level of openness and provision of geospatial HVD in Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia, using the extended and modified Global Open Data Index methodology (GODI Plus). It is expected that this will provide an answer to the status of OD policies and government engagement in OD in Croatia and identify good OD practices among the three countries analyzed. Furthermore, the results will be a baseline benchmark for future HVD analyses. The results reveal low data openness for Croatia and Serbia, high data openness for Slovenia, and a low level of government engagement in all three proposed countries.