HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

1 Despite the rapid proliferation of open data platforms, the accessibility and ease of use of data portals is low. This factor prevents citizens and civil society organizations from exploiting open data for their goals. The poor usability of current generation of open data platforms could be attributed to the fact that these platforms were not designed for non-technical users. They are typically software products developed "by programmers for programmers or technical users". Consequently, while reports about innovative use of open data by software developers and start-ups are common, there are very few reports about successful public use of open data to tackle concrete societal challenges. This paper provides the results and lessons learnt from the usability evaluation of the second alpha release of a next generation open data platform designed explicitly to support non-technical users. A scenario involving a transportation challenge in Dublin City was employed as the context for the evaluation of the platform. Findings provide some empirical basis for identifying important user interface design considerations, patterns for highly usable open data platforms and considerations for open data policy.

Producing new generation of digital public services from open data is of major interest to policymakers, practitioners and academia in the digital government community. Recent efforts in the area of Linked Statistical Data suggest that the associated multidimensional data cubes are excellent resources that could underpin data-driven digital public services. We describe in this paper a set of tools and approach to exploiting linked statistical data produced from the integration of streams of open marine datasets for developing digital services to support Marine Rescue Operations. We also highlight the opportunities enabled through co-creation activities as well as the benefit and challenges for scaling and sustaining the initiative.

Contemporary data infrastructures are yet to afford easy access to available data, better understanding of these data, engagement around data to drive collective sense-making and knowledge cocreation. This work synthesizes the knowledge gained through a 40month research and innovation project which led to designing and implementing an architecture which addresses those challenges.

The increasing volumes of datasets published on open data platforms have had little impact on the public use of open data and perceived transparency of respective governments. At the same time, the innovation potentials of these datasets are far from realized due to many factors including poor quality of datasets. While past studies have attempted to catalog barriers to open data exploitation and use; few studies have focused on the role of the available open data platforms in tackling this problem. In addressing this gap, this research work examines the problems (or pathologies) associated with the use of current generation of open data platforms and perspectives of stakeholders on desirable features and affordances. Results from our analysis of existing platforms and stakeholders' views show several limiting factors on available platforms. Findings also provide insights into three categories of platform affordances that could spur greater use of open data published on these platforms and enhanced transparency of respective governments.