Does eContent talk to the heart?

The idea to add some value to already existing data was already addressed by the EC within the eContent framework: Content and services sometimes are built on top of existing data sets, and more than ten years ago the European Commission created the eContent framework to improve the added value reuse of public data sets. At that time, one of the challenges faced when submitting project proposals was to understand: which kind of data sets and how to reuse them—according to IPRs, according to privacy rules, etc.? The recently emerged keyword “open data” represents one of the nowadays’ challenges. Institutions and companies are investing time and resources in order to turn such a concept into reality. Open data refers to the idea that certain data should be freely available for use and re-use. When dealing with open data we must take into consideration, among others, two main aspects: the public body can legally dispose of the processed data using them freely and eventually re-firing them as it may consider useful? How it can be wise to behave in managing their rights? This is a real problem when dealing with public administrations especially in the field of cultural heritage, because there is a lot of material, such as books, pictures, maps and other potential content, but people don’t know exactly how to manage the rights and how to transfer certain rights to people using the material afterwards. There are some European Regulations in the EU concerning open data; guidelines in order to use such kind of data sets, basically 2 or 3 directives. Some of the EU Member States adopted the European directives at a local level, other countries were able to tune their already existing regulations in order to fit the European directives and other just continued with their already existing regulations. All public bodies are mainly concerned about data ownership, intellectual property and privacy. These issues are directly related to questions such as the origin of the data sets, i.e., the responsible of the project, data providers, harvesting procedure etc.; the procedure used to collect the data, the intellectual property ownership and transfer, i.e., who is the actual owner, which rights have been transferred, etc.; the protection of sensitive data and related citizens’ privacy issues; as well as statistic confidentiality, i.e., data anonymization. The release and re-use of public bodies’ datasets may impact citizens’ privacy. Personal information represent a wide range of data; they include any data concerning any identifiable individual and in some countries this applies even to companies if their data may involve individuals. ......