The Blurry Status of Data Derivated from Open Data

Jonathan Raper, who chaired yesterday’s London set for information revolution during which London’ mayor announced the city’s open data project (see London datastore) explained why policies towards information has evolved in the UK from Thatcher’s ‘user pays’ principle to the opening governmental agencies datastores due to recent ‘digital transition’, ‘mobile revolution’ and ‘open source movements’; and warns that a lot of work has to be achieved to make this promised future happen:

However, this is only the beginning of the process:
- we have to unwind some of the commercial partnerships government has in place to manage its information to ensure that it is released without conditions;
- we have to remove provisions like limitations on ‘derived data’ products when new opendata services want to use government data as a framework;
- we must look for ways to ensure that the innovations to be created are offered to all with full accessibility;
- we must ensure that the legitimate privacy expectations of the citizen are not compromised by information releases.

Why do I blog this: The conditions and limitations on ‘derived data’ products is often overlooked in open interface/data initiatives, and developers/analysts/entrepreneur must often act in grey areas. At what point are data derived enough to lose their open/public/free status?