The two ends of Open Data

OKD or Open Knowledge Data is a term increasingly used in connection with the Semantic Web. It follows the philosophy of openness as used in Open Source or Open Access, whereby an artefact is free to retrieve, use, reuse, and share.

We have lived with open knowledge for thousands of years. It’s when a tribal elder told a Neanderthal youngster how to hunt, or when your granny passed on the recipe of her magnificent apple pie.

Now, things are about to change. It is a sad fact, that formalisation of openness is the only response we have to the digitisation of knowledge. In the digital world, giving ‘verbal’ advice or collecting data leaves traces and timestamps that trigger copy- and intellectual property rights. It also comes in the widest possible variety of formats. This leads to a dilemma for research, in that it becomes enormously difficult to reproduce findings – a fundamental requirement for testing hypotheses.

For learning analytics there are further obstacles. It’s somewhat bizarre that the default position of commercial social networks is completely opposite to education. Where in the commercial world user data by default is treated as public (unless actively protected by the user), in education the data default is set to private, and special permission needs to be sought to use that data at all. Since, at least in Higher Education, people can be seen as voluntarily opting into that system, in the same way as they opt into a social network, it would be sensible to change the system default.

When it comes to personal or private data, there is a further dilemma: ownership. When data are collected, e.g. by a commercial company, their use maybe unethical and even unlawful. Lawyers in Germany have recently started legal proceedings against Google’s Gmail reading your e-mail messages in order to provide personalised advertisements. While users of Gmail signed an agreement that allows Google to scan their messages, the recipient of the message did not. It’s a privacy infringement.

In conclusion, there are at least two end parties involved in data gathering: the data gatherer and the data subject. It is unresolved who has ownership of the data, the party who produces it through enacting a particular behaviour, or the party that collects this data and makes it explicit and exploitable. Whatever the bottom line of this, in order to protect privacy, it is not enough to have an open data agreement with just one of them.