Speculation on Issues concerning Combining Plural Public Data Sets

Abstract

Governments are promoting the use of open data, providing also tools and services. However, their presumed uses are mainly based on a single data set. Potentially most valuable uses of public data, however, consist of combining two or more data sets which are independently designed and collected. For this kind of use, there must be two prior conditions. First, the catalogue of existing open data sets must be available. Secondly, two or more data sets must be combined efficiently. As this is outside of the original scope of the data providors, tools and services to combine more than one data sets do not seem widely available. The article addresses these issues around combining two or more open/public data sets, as a preparation for statistical analyses.