Open Data - a literature review

When electronic data is made openly available, everyone is empowered to freely use, reuse and redistribute it. This is particularly useful for governmental or research data, which can be viewed as a public good. The objective of this paper is to identify primary themes in the current literature about open data and summarise characteristics and future directions for research in this area. A systematic review of open data literature was performed resulting in 102 publications, which were analysed and organised according to a classification framework developed during this study. The outcome of this review is a taxonomy of open data research that reveals its current state, identifies existing gaps, and suggests future directions for studies in this field.