governments, businesses, and individuals for anyone to access, use, and share.”<sup>25</sup> However, a more nuanced definition comes from the Open Data Handbook, which delineates a number of functions that data must fulfill to be deemed as “open”. As such, Open Data must possess three key attributes:<sup>26</sup>

- **Availability and Access:** “Data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the Internet.”

- **Reuse and Redistribution:** “Data must be provided under terms that permit reuse and redistribution including the intermixing with other data sets.”

- **Universal Participation:** “Everyone must be able to use, reuse, and redistribute; there should be no discrimination against fields of endeavor or against persons or groups.”

Other authors have taken more parsimonious perspecives on the relationship among Big Data, Open Data, and OGD, which speaks to the nauce of the concepts and further elucidates the subject of this research. Gurin (2014) notes that Big Data are usually passivley generated, and often kept private, including “data that retailers keep on customers’ buying habits, that cell phone companies keep on their mobile users, or that hospitals collect about their patients.”<sup>27</sup> Alternately, Gurin characterizes Open Data as “public” and “purposful”—and as such, “information that has a particular goal in mind, such as fueling new businesses, improving public health, or identifing wasteful spending.”<sup>28</sup> Further illustrating the overlap and interaction of these terms, the World Bank likewise notes the following: “Open data are those that are freely and easily accessible, machine-readable, and explicitly unrestricted in use. Open data aren’t necessarily big, and big data aren’t necessarily open.”<sup>29</sup> Drawing on these conceptions, the Open Data Charter, which was first signed in July 2013, further delineates the difference between Open Data, and what constitutes _Open Government Data_ , which is the central concept of the present research. In particular, the Charter “recognizes that the term “government data” includes, but is not limited to, data held by national, regional, local, and city governments, international governmental bodies, and other types of institutions in the wider public sector.”<sup>30</sup> Given the plurality of perspectives on these closely interrelated topics, the present research will rely on—for the sake of simplicity and clarity—a two-part definition of OGD as put forth by the OECD.<sup>31</sup> Such a conception marries two constituent elements: (i) “government data,” which includes “any data and information produced or commissioned by public bodies;” and “open data,” which, similar to other definitions, “can be freely used, re-used and distributed by anyone, only subject to (at the most) the requirement that users attribute the data and that they make their work available to be shared as well.”<sup>32</sup> The current research question also relates to a growing literature on transparency and conceptions of “openness” in government. Similar to what constitutes OGD, transparency has no single definition nor is there a single indicator to measure it. Instead, transparency takes on a variety of different meanings and measures across organizations and within the literature. Khemani (2016) provides one of the simplest and most straightforward definitions of transparency as “citizen access to publicly available information about

> 25 Open Data Institute, “Supporting Sustainable Development with Open Data” Division for Public Administration and Development Management of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2017).

> 26 See Open Data Handbook at http://opendatahandbook.org/guide/en/what-is-open-data/

> 27 J. Gurin, _Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation_ (2014) at p. 13. 28 Ibid.

> 29 World Bank Group _World Development Report: Digital Dividends_ (2016) at p.244.

> 30 See https://opendatacharter.net/history/. Accessed January 5, 2018.

> 31 B. Ubaldi, "Open Government Data: Towards Empirical Analysis of Open Government Data Initiatives", OECD Working Papers on Public Governance, No. 22, OECD Publishing, Paris (2013).

> 32 Ubaldi at p. 6.

7