Open Government Data Systems : Learning from a Public Utility Perspective

Previous research on Open Government Data (OGD) struggleswith synthesising a holistic perspective of OGD systems. A perspectivethat has dealt with vast, complex systems is public utility. Publicutilities are, for example, water supply networks and electric power grids.This study explores what we can learn from a public utility perspectivewhen perceiving and organising OGD systems. We used a hermeneuticliterature review combined with a snowballing approach, resulting in aselection of 39 studies. We compare public utilities and OGD systems toderive ve lessons: (1) an OGD system can be perceived from a node- owview, (2) the foundational data ow of an OGD system starts at datacollection and ends at data used by the public in an everyday context, (3)the organisation of OGD systems needs to consider the combinability, interpretability,and boundless reusability of data, (4) OGD systems needgovernance organisations that cover the whole system, and (5) OGD systemscould replace existing data provision systems and be made a publicutility if certain characteristic problems are overcome