Facilitating access and reusing public data by businesses may bring billions to the economy as well as significant savings to the administration; in this regard, Poland has a great potential but does not take advantage of it – concluded Mr Maciej Bukowski, PhD, from the Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies (WISE).
– Governments collect a very large amount of data, for example about our health, weather and climate, crime, the activities of the judiciary or road traffic. Public databases contain massive amounts of information, yet those in control of it are often unaware of what they have or that what they have could be of value to someone. Meanwhile, the data in question has an enormous potential for the economy – Mr Bukowski, the co-author of a research study on the use of big data and open data resources in Europe, told the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
He has added that, until today, most people associated the question of access to public information primarily with the issues of transparency and control of government actions – in other words, access to information was considered to be primarily a political right. This issue, however, has recently began to be viewed in a different light; as a result, the question of reuse of public information – framed as an economic and social right – came to the fore.
An example of such use of data are the activities of online navigation services such as Google Maps, which are created on the basis of cartographic data made available by the state. Another example are websites such as the Polish jakdojade.pl site, which operate on the basis of public transport timetables. One should also mention companies such as aWhere, a US company which, using meteorological and agricultural data, creates solutions which make it possible to plan agricultural production more efficiently.
According to estimates prepared by WISE, the potential of big data and open data resources in Europe accounts for nearly 2% of the GDP within the next 10-15 years. – Tapping into this potential could lead to an increase of the income per capita by an amount of 300-500 euros, which is quite a lot. The possible gains resulting from the opening of public data resources alone will be slightly smaller, yet by no means insignificant, since they may amount to as much as EUR 10 billion – Mr Bukowski concluded.