Open Government Data Beyond Transparency

This paper aims to present and analyse the Open Government Data (OGD) legislation framework in force in the current Italian legal system. The previous legislation has been compared with the recently enacted Legislative Decree about transparency (the so called Transparency Act d.lgs. 33/2013). After discussing the normative contest, this paper completes the theoretical analysis with an empirical research conducted on the Italian Municipalities’ web sites (35 portals) in order to deeply understand the connection between the Open Government Data legislation and the new Transparency Act. The aim of this comparison is to test and prove our theory about the fact that the Transparency Act doesn’t enable and reinforce the OGD – as FOIAs do – but it subtracts resources, human capital, skills, funds and motivations. The Transparency Act, in fact, implements an old-style model of web site oriented to a "Public Administration centered" paradigm instead of an "ODG centered" one. The authors, finally, wants to identify a method to combine the two different approaches, having a unique production workflow of data and documents in Open Data format, with a semantic web metadata classification that qualify the information.