Using Open Research Data for Public Policy Making: Opportunities of Virtual Research Environments
Governments and publicly funded research organisations increasingly make research data available openly. Researchers can use this data in Virtual Research Environments (VREs) to conduct multidisciplinary data driven research and to obtain new insights potentially for governmental policy making. However, the requirements for such a VRE are not yet clear. The objective of this study is to elicit and define requirements for a multidisciplinary VRE that integrates Open Government Data (OGD) and open research data for public policy making. Based on a VRE case study, we elicit 13 VRE requirements related to data storage, data accessing, data curation and other aspects, and describe a use case of open data for governmental policy making. Meeting the requirements results in a VRE that 1) overlays the existing e Research Infrastructures to provide researchers with integrated open data from different domains, 2) offers OGD in combination with data from publicly funded research, and 3) stimulates innovation and research collaboration.
2016 Conference for E Democracy and Open Government (CeDEM)