LIST leads the first evaluation of the economic impacts of open data in Luxembourg

On 8 April 2016, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg officially launched its national open data portal data.public.lu. This portal, supported by Digital Luxembourg, the government agency in charge of digital affairs in the country, was presented during the first Game of Code hackathon organized that same year. In this context, the Open Government Data (OGD)’s philosophy is to promote transparency, accountability and value creation by making government data available to all.

LIST was mandated by the Luxembourg government to lead the first evaluation of the economic impact of Open Data in Luxembourg for 2018.

Approaches for the evaluation of Open Data impacts – the Luxembourg profile

The methodology of the evaluation “Impacts of Open Data in Luxembourg and the Greater Region” made for Luxembourg government combines the different approaches of the state-of-the-art and adapts them to the profile of Luxembourg, including one macroeconomic study, two surveys (private and public sectors) and an analysis of the portal data.public.lu’s logs that hosts currently around 750 datasets and highlights more than 100 re-uses.

Open Data is grounded on the openness principle, which is designed to minimize the burden on re-users, but it largely deprives data providers of the means to know the re-users, the intensity of the re-use, the modalities of this, as well as the value created from the public assets (because of the free of charge principle induced by the marginal cost). This therefore requires a very broad approach that draws on all available means to capture and analyse the traces of re-use, which implies adopting a methodology taking into account different types of indicators, quantitative or qualitative, at different scales.

The study led by LIST includes methodological guidelines and results that are from now on available online, and can be downloaded at data.public.lu.

Supporting national initiatives and innovative projects

LIST is active in the field of Open Data and over the last decade, researchers have addressed Open Data from technical, organisational and socio-economic perspectives, gaining experience thanks to their participation in national and international innovative initiatives and projects. 

LIST researchers have worked mostly on the release, discoverability and re-use by third parties of open data. They have also participated in SHARE-PSI 2.0, contributing to the definition of the “Best Practices for Sharing Public Sector Information” and edited the localised guidelines for Luxembourg. Since 2016, LIST is the lead technical partner of the “Building an Ecosystem to Generate Opportunities in Open Data” (BE-GOOD) project supported by the North-West Europe (NWE) INTERREG programme. Read the dedicated BE-GOOD news article published on 10/12/2018.

Following the publication of the study, the institute was cited in the latest edition of the 2018 European Data Portal Landscaping Insight and presented as a good practice for open data impact assessment.

> Download the study “Impacts of Open Data in Luxembourg and the Greater Region” on data.public.lu.

> To go further, LIST will organise together with its partners, the "1st workshop on open data reuse: addressing mobility and transport issues in Luxembourg" on 25/01/2019 in Luxembourg.

> For any further information on this topic, contact Slim Turki via email.