Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza

Descrizione del progetto

• Abstract:

Public bodies collate, generate, update and otherwise manage tremendous amounts of information. Information and communication technologies offer unprecedented practical means to access, process, share, combine and reuse such vast information body. As a result, new resources providing considerable added value can be generated and disseminated to meet demand deriving from private, public and third-sector (no profit) actors. However, Public Sector Information Holders (PSIH) may not have sufficient incentives to manage this potential source of economic and cultural growth; when they set out to do so, they often face significant obstacles. Apart from technical difficulties, a significant barrier may derive from legal and economic complexities involved in designing a set of rules to make PSI accessible and reusable while preventing inappropriate forms of exploitation.

The proposed research intends to address the difficult issues concerning PSI and intends to do so from a multidisciplinary perspective, which, while focusing strongly on the legal dimension, is also to deal with some economic and technological aspects.

While the most suitable definition of PSI is ultimately one of the objectives of the project, even a preliminary analysis suggests that such a definition should encompass both non-cultural and cultural data, thus integrating the approach followed by the EU PSI Directive with the OECD definition of PSI. More specifically, "non-cultural PSI" is understood as including data deriving from land registry, geographical, meteorological, agricultural information, company register's data, court reports, legal provisions, and health related data, etc. On the other hand, "Cultural PSI" is understood to include data on museums, libraries, archives in general and related metadata. Our preliminary definition of PSI also includes some middle ground, such as studies produced by public bodies and academic publications. The definition is instrumental to the task of charting the perimeters of accessible and reusable PSI at the regional level.

• Consortium:

Coordinator of the project: Università di Torino

Partners:

• Politecnico di Torino – Dauin;
• Fondazione Rosselli.