Open data is made public for everyone to use without restrictions such as copyrights or patents.  Click here for a more detailed description of open data from the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Open data is available from numerous countries, states, cities, nonprofit organizations, companies, and other sources that make data available for public use at their respective websites.  While open data provides great value, it is infrequently optimized for integration with other open data sets.

As more open data becomes available around the world, integration and conformation of open data will lead to greater insights and value than can be found in standalone data sets.

The mission of Open Data Bits is to provide guidance and documentation for finding, mashing up, and visualizing open data to increase usability and interoperability with other data sets.  We intend to provide data modeling advice that helps mash up different open data sets along with documentation to explain the corresponding logical relationships and transformations.

Open Data Bits supports efforts to create standards for the delivery and technical architecture of open data such as the Open Data Protocol.  Once a technical standard for open data interoperability has taken root, our mission can proceed with greater simplicity.

Open Data Bits has four principles for the content we provide:

  1. Open Data Bits is a rapidly evolving project that will inevitably require change.  Our long term goal is to provide modeling resources and documentation methods that continually improve as more open data sets are featured.
  2. Open data will provide the greatest value when it is accessible without requiring advanced IT skills.  All attempts will be made to provide content that can be understood by people who do not specialize in writing code.
  3. Open Data Bits will not attempt to assert scientific or statistical conclusions based upon open data that we feature.
  4. Open Data Bits will always attempt to respect Open Data license terms.  Open Data Bits applauds the effort, time, and expense that countries, agencies, companies, and other organizations invest in making open data accessible to the public.