You're reading: Study: Open data could provide $1.4 billion boost

Open data contributed over $700 million to the Ukrainian economy last year, and the benefits may double by 2025, according to a new study by the Kyiv School of Economics.

Presented on April 25, the study of the economic impact of open data in Ukraine was the first of its type to be carried out in Ukraine. The research was conducted with the support of London-based Open Data Institute and the Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services (TAPAS) project, which is funded by U.S. and British state aid agencies.

Researchers from the Kyiv School of Economics calculated that open data brought $700 million to the Ukrainian economy in 2017 through a combination of direct and indirect benefits. And they concluded that amount could rise to over $1.4 billion by 2025 if the Ukrainian government continues to publish more datasets, and the data is used to develop new digital products, fight corruption, and improve decision-making for businesses.

In addition, the growing open data sector may create 2,000 new jobs in addition to the current workforce of 3,000-4,000 people.

Experts say, the country is at an early, promising stage of its open data development, but that there’s a lot more Ukraine still has to do.

The State agency for e-governance began working in 2014 and launched a website for the government’s open data. At the end of 2017, the Cabinet of Ministers expanded the list of datasets that have to be made public by the government agencies.

Today, data.gov.ua contains 35,000 datasets from 2,000 sources, but only 26 percent of them are readable by machines, let alone humans. Processing data in non-machine readable formats is more costly, as it requires sophisticated algorithms and programs.

Outdated or poor quality data may also result in poor decision making. And if data is only comprehensible to a small group of specialists who have the appropriate skills and tools, it will create an imbalance of power in society, warns one of the study authors, Artur Kovalchuk, from the Kyiv School of Economics.

“Improving the quality of released datasets is one of our top priorities,” head of the State agency for e-governance Oleksandr Ryzhenko said on April 25.

Richard Stirling from Open Data Institute added that open data should be published from high-impact sectors and under an open license that grants permission to access, reuse, and redistribute data.

However, as Kovalchuk said, not all data has to be open to everyone. Some restrictions have to be in place to protect personal and commercially sensitive information.

But at the end of the day, more open datasets in machine-readable formats and under open license would stimulate developers to create new tools to serve people’s needs and solve particular issues.

Ukraine already has a number of successful services based on open data.

Data aggregators like YouControl, OpenDataBot, 007, and Kontrahent compile portfolios on company owners, court records, debts, and connections. Initially targeted at entrepreneurs so that they could vet potential business partners, the services soon became popular with investigative journalists too.

Another example is the Ukrainian website tabletki.ua, which collects data on available drugs in stock and prices from over 2,700 pharmacies and has six million visitors per month. And EasyWay shares public transport timetables, routes, and stops in 60 cities around Ukraine.

Since 2017, developers and entrepreneurs have competed in the Open Data Challenge to win funding to develop open-data based applications and tools.