Journal of Geographical Systems (2021) 23:497–514

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-021-00363-5

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Open data products‑A framework for creating valuable

analysis ready data

Dani Arribas‑Bel1 · Mark Green1 · Francisco Rowe1 · Alex Singleton1

Received: 17 October 2019 / Accepted: 29 June 2021 / Published online: 20 October 2021
© The Author(s) 2021

Abstract
This paper develops the notion of “open data product”. We define an open data
product as the open result of the processes through which a variety of data (open and
not) are turned into accessible information through a service, infrastructure, analyt-
ics or a combination of all of them, where each step of development is designed to
promote open principles. Open data products are born out of a (data) need and add
value beyond simply publishing existing datasets. We argue that the process of add-
ing value should adhere to the principles of open (geographic) data science, ensur-
ing openness, transparency and reproducibility. We also contend that outreach, in
the form of active communication and dissemination through dashboards, software
and publication are key to engage end-users and ensure societal impact. Open data
products have major benefits. First, they enable insights from highly sensitive, con-
trolled and/or secure data which may not be accessible otherwise. Second, they can
expand the use of commercial and administrative data for the public good leveraging
on their high temporal frequency and geographic granularity. We also contend that
there is a compelling need for open data products as we experience the current data
revolution. New, emerging data sources are unprecedented in temporal frequency
and geographical resolution, but they are large, unstructured, fragmented and often
hard to access due to privacy and confidentiality concerns. By transforming raw
(open or “closed”) data into ready to use open data products, new dimensions of
human geographical processes can be captured and analysed, as we illustrate with
existing examples. We conclude by arguing that several parallels exist between the
role that open source software played in enabling research on spatial analysis in the
90 s and early 2000s, and the opportunities that open data products offer to unlock
the potential of new forms of (geo-)data.

Keywords Geographic data science · Open data · Open source

* Dani Arribas‑Bel
[email protected]
1
Geographic Data Science Lab, Department of Geography and Planning, University
of Liverpool, Roxby Building, 74, Bedford St S., Liverpool L69 7ZT, UK

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JEL Classification C55 · C63 · C80

1 Introduction

In the current era of digital transformation, data are a central pillar of the global
economy and society. We have passed the point at which more data are being col-
lected than can be physically stored (Lyman and Varian 2003; Gantz et al. 2007;
Hilbert and López 2011).1 In addition to traditional forms of data, such as social
surveys and censuses, major technological innovations have enabled an explosion in
the generation, collection and use of new forms of data (Timmins et al. 2018). Net-
worked sensors embedded in electronic devices, such as mobile phones, satellites,
vehicles, smart energy meters, computers, GPS trackers and industrial machines can
now sense, create and store data on locations, transactions, operations and people.
Social media, web search engines and online shopping platforms have also spurred
this data revolution by recording and storing users’ activity and personal informa-
tion. Data are created as a by-product through interaction with these technological
systems. While they are often not designed for research purposes, they can bring
value for answering research questions (Timmins et al. 2018).
The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate and share informa-
tion has significantly expanded. In 2018, companies worldwide were estimated to
have generated and stored an excess of 33 zettabytes,2 seven exabytes of new data
(Cisco 2018). Networked sensor technology in the financial services, manufactur-
ing, healthcare and media and entertainment industries was estimated to account for
48 percent of global data generation globally in 2018 (Cisco 2018). In July 2019,
66 percent (over 5 billion people) of the world’s population were estimated to use
mobile phones, 56 percent (over 4.3 billion) to be internet users, and 46 percent
(over 3.4 billion) to comprise active social media users, whose penetration is grow-
ing at over 7 percent at year (Hootsuite and We Are Social 2019).
Despite the growing volume and speed of data collection and storage, only a
small share are actually used. In 2019, a global study found that most organisations
analysed less than half of the data they collected (Splunk, 2019). In 2018, a similar
global survey estimated that 96% of all generated data in the engineering and con-
struction industry goes unused (Snyder et al. 2018). In 2011, a small share of scien-
tists from a survey of 1700 leading scientists reported to regularly use and analyse

1
Lyman and Varian (2003), for instance, estimated that 5 exabytes of new data generated through elec-
tronic channels, such as telephone, radio, television and the Internet were stored globally in 2002 but that
more than three times that amount (i.e. 18 exabytes) were produced and not stored. Gantz et al. (2007)
estimated that the amount of digital data created and replicated (255 exabytes) exceeded the storage
capacity available (246 exabytes) in 2007. Hilbert and López (2011) estimated that the global general-
purpose computing capacity -as a measure of the ability to generate and process data- grew at an annual
rate of 58 percent, while global storage capacity grew at an annual rate of 23 percent between 1986 and
2007.
2
One zettabyte is equivalent to 1­ 021 bytes. To visualise this, it would take one billion 1 TB external hard
drives to store a zettabyte of data.

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Open data products‑A framework for creating valuable analysis… 499

large data sets (Science Staff 2011). Only 12 percent reported data sets exceeding
100 gigabytes and use data sets exceeding 1 terabyte (Science Staff 2011).
The low utilisation rate of data may be reflective of barriers to access, as well
as inability to process such vast quantities of information efficiently. Two key chal-
lenges involve privacy and confidentiality concerns, as well as the unstructured
nature of data production and storage (Hanson et al. 2011; Manyika et al. 2015).
Privacy and confidentiality concerns restrict access to data collected by companies
and government agencies. The frequency, detail and geographical granularity of
data being generated are unprecedented and therefore ensuring their privacy, con-
fidentiality and integrity is critical. While legislation has been slow in responding
to the changing landscape of digital data, it is now evolving in this direction. Major
changes to ensure data protection and privacy were made to the EU General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR) which came into effect in 2018. Innovative institu-
tional arrangements, such as data collaboratives (Verhulst, Young and Srinivasan
2017; Klievink et al. 2018) or services (e.g. Consumer Data Research Centre in the
UK), have developed data sharing protocols and secure environments to facilitate
access to commercial and administrative data for research purposes.
New forms of data are often highly unstructured and messy. They are produced
in multiple formats, including videos, images and text; and, are stored in various
organisational structures. Data are often not random samples of populations and
are collected for specific administrative, business or operational purposes, and not
necessarily for research (Hand 2018; Meng 2018; Timmins et al. 2018). In their
original form, new forms of data are thus not readily usable limiting their applica-
tions. Significant data engineering is required, involving the use and design of spe-
cialised methods, software and expert knowledge, and linkage to other data sources
(Hand 2018). To our knowledge, no formal analytical framework has been devel-
oped to chart the critical data engineering processes to develop purposely-built data
products.
In this paper, we propose and develop the idea of Open Data Products (ODPs) as
a framework to transform raw data into Analysis Ready Data (Giuliani et al.2017;
Dwyer et al. 2018) and identify the key features that we contend of this framework.
We define an ODP as the final data outcome resulting from adding value to raw,
highly complex, unstructured and difficult-to-access data to address a well-defined
problem, and making the generated data output openly available. Thus, three funda-
mental components characterise an ODP: its insightful utility, value added and open
availability. We argue that an open data product has two major benefits. First, it ena-
bles developing insights from scattered, and/or highly sensitive, and/or controlled,
and/or secure data which may be difficult to gather and use, or may not be accessible
otherwise. Second, it expands the use of commercial and administrative data for the
public good leveraging on their high temporal frequency and geographic granularity.
We also contend that there is a compelling need for data open products as we expe-
rience the current data revolution. New, emerging data sources are unprecedented
in temporal frequency and geographical resolution, but they are large, unstructured,
fragmented and often expensive to assemble and possibly hard to access due to pri-
vacy and confidentiality concerns. By transforming raw (open or “closed”) data
into valuable open data products, new dimensions of human geographical processes

13
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can be captured and analysed. Ultimately, ODPs may provide valuable guidance to
develop appropriate policy interventions.
The paper is structured as follows: The next section defines and develops the idea
of ODPs detailing the core elements to developing ODPs. We outline a framework
that covers the initial conception of an ODP and moving through to developing and
disseminating a product. Following, we discuss some of the challenges involved in
the process of developing ODPs. The fourth section introduces some case studies
of ODP exemplars which highlight the potential offered through our framework.
Finally, we conclude the paper discussing the future potential of ODPs.

2 Defining open data products

Defining Open Data Products (ODPs) is challenging since their remit is wide and
incorporates several, diverse aspects. In some ways, they share several character-
istics with traditional open data, as described in Kitchin (2014) or Janssen et al.
(2012). To the extent ODPs result in open data, they also share most of their main
benefits for society (Molloy 2011). It might be intuitive to assume that making
Open Data 3 available that were previously not accessible would constitute an ODP.
However, building ODPs is a broader project encapsulating frameworks for prod-
uct development, such as data, delivery channels, transparent processes, etc. Indeed,
ODPs adhere to standard principles of product development (e.g. Bhuiyan 2011)
such as end user feedback or prioritising goals more than almost any other academic
output.
In this context, we define ODPs as:
The open result of transparent processes through which a variety of data (open
and not) are turned into accessible information through a service, infrastruc-
ture, analytics or a combination of all of them, where each step of development
follows open principles.
We argue that the key difference between ODP over purely Open Data is the
value added, which widens accessibility and use of data that would otherwise be
expensive or inaccessible. Components of an ODP might include sophisticated data
analysis to transform input data, digital infrastructure to host generated datasets, and
dashboards, interactive web mapping sites or academic papers documenting the pro-
cess. They almost always merge together data and algorithms but this is not neces-
sarily a requisite.
While we adhere to general open principles, we recognise not all steps of the pro-
cess can (or even need to) be fully open. We also argue a need for hybrid approaches
that allow for closed data to be incorporated and opened up through the creation of

3
Open Data have numerous definitions but commonly refer to data that are released into the public
domain without restrictive licenses that prevent their reuse or inclusion in derivative products. Such data
are differentiated from free data (e.g. Twitter/Facebook API), that may be restricted in terms of access
limits, but also importantly in the purposes to which the data can be applied or used.

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Open data products‑A framework for creating valuable analysis… 501

ODPs (Singleton and Longley 2019). Such approaches are necessary for widening
access to information derived from sensitive data. The resulting product should be
released as open data; ideally too, the majority of the process that results in an ODP
should be open, and although it might not be possible to release every component of
an ODP, those related to infrastructure such as computer code, platforms and algo-
rithms required to generate output data should be made available and transparent
(Peng 2011; Singleton et al. 2016). Akin to the argument in open-source software,
this is not only so that third parties re-run every step of the process again before
using the data, but also to build a reproducible environment of trust that contributes
to user adoption of the product’s outputs (Brunsdon and Comber 2020).
Although ODPs can take many forms and shapes, and hence differ greatly from
each other, we think providing a few examples can be useful to land an abstract term
in more practical settings. We will use two case studies that together embody dif-
ferently but well both the ethos and the building blocks of ODPs: geodemographic
classifications and data generated around the COVID19 pandemic. Below we intro-
duce each, and we will return to different aspects in the next section.
Geodemographic classifications are created with the aim of describing the most
salient characteristics of people and the areas where they live (Webber and Burrows
2018). There are various classifications spanning different countries and substan-
tive uses across both the public and private sector (Singleton and Spielman 2014).
Geodemographic classifications combine diverse sources of publicly and privately
available data to generate insights about the behaviour of existing or prospective
customers, service users and citizens. Technically, a geodemographic classification
collates and combines disparate sources of data through a computational data reduc-
tion technique called cluster analysis that groups areas into a set of representative
clusters describing salient patterns based on their similarity across a wide range of
descriptive attributes.
Our second set of illustrations relate to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The need
to respond rapidly and efficiently to the spread of the virus, to save lives and sustain
the economy, created intense demand for actionable data and information to feed
into responsive decision making. Despite the global scope of the pandemic, many
of the data generation, collection and processing systems originally in place were
national at most, but in many cases regional or local. To bridge the gap between the
available data and insight required, several researchers and organisations launched
efforts to develop open data products. These included, for example, consolidated
databases (e.g. Riffe et al. 2021) as well as ODPs derived from advanced analysis
(e.g. Paez et al. 2020).

3 The building blocks of open data products

In this section, we outline the key components of our proposed framework for devel-
oping ODPs. First, ODPs are born out of a need or problem that needs insight and
will inform many design choices. Once the need is clearly delineated, the ODP
process adds value to existing data in ways that help meet the original need. Add-
ing value usually takes two forms: potentially complex transformations, fusion and

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abstraction of the data in what we call Open (Geographic) Data Science; and out-
reach activities to ensure the original need is addressed with the maximum impact.
Throughout these explanations, we illustrate key points with the geodemographics
and COVID-19 case studies introduced above.

3.1 Identifying a problem in need of insight

Inception of an ODP begins with the identification of a concept or idea to address

some problem that requires insight. Developing meaningful products often requires
thinking less about ‘what’ a product might be, and more about ‘who’ might use it
and what they would want to know. As such, identifying end users, understanding
opportunities for satisfying their needs and mapping such opportunities to what
is possible with the available data, skills and resources available can help to focus
ODPs, and maximise their relevance. We would like to highlight this stage is usually
followed in the research process (i.e. thinking about the “research question”), but
that is not always the case in processes that result in open data. In fact, several open
datasets are explicitly released as a side effect of the data existing for other purposes,
and their release does not always have a clear end goal. While this has sometimes
spurred several innovations (e.g. smartphone apps as a result of transit data made
available as open data), we want to stress that ODPs are most useful when designed
for a purpose and to further a goal.
This process can be independent, however if possible co-designing products can
be an effective approach. Co-design (or co-production) is the involvement of exter-
nal partners within the research process to help create user-led and user-focused
products (Ostrom 1996). It is not clear what activities might be considered co-design
(Filipe et al. 2017), however this process does not necessarily have to be onerous.
Building trust through collaborations can help to ensure relevant and impactful
products (Klievink et al. 2018). Data or knowledge exchange can facilitate partner-
ships, as well as opening up new ODPs that often would otherwise have not been
made available. Developing partnerships (termed data collaboratives) is relevant
here which are cross-sector initiatives for sharing or developing new data products
that add value to the work undertaken by each actor in the collaboration (Klievink
et al. 2018).
The principles of co-design are not limited to the identification of the product. It
applies to each part of our framework, and understanding the end user needs is core
to designing a successful product.
Perhaps the clearest example of the importance of a problem needing insight can
be found in the recent pandemic. Understanding the uneven impact of the pandemic
on society requires information about how different demographic groups from a
wide variety of geographic contexts are affected. However, very few readily avail-
able datasets exist to understand the dynamics on the pandemic as it unfolds across
different countries and different age groups. To fill this gap, Riffe et al. (2021) intro-
duce a global demographic database of COVID-19 cases and deaths, COVerAGE-
DB, enabling cross-country comparisons in the experiences of the pandemic.

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Open data products‑A framework for creating valuable analysis… 503

3.2 Adding value

The development of ODPs is not merely about making raw data available, as data
driven innovation is more than opening up availability and use of data (Klievink
et al. 2018). A key tenant of ODPs is to process, analyse and build on the original
data, resulting in analysis ready data4 (see, for example, the collection introduced by
Zhu 2019). This enhances the value of the information and opportunities for insight.
The added value of ODPs can be achieved through numerous strategies, although
these should ideally be linked to the first step of the framework to maximise their
utility.
Development of new ODPs that extend the uses of existing data create value
through producing new information. Data analysis can extract useful information or
process data to create a new resource that demonstrates clear value added. Sources
that cannot be made available in their raw form (often due to disclosure control
or commercial sensitivity) can be made openly available through processing and
manipulating into new ODPs with data owner permission.
Improving usability of data can help increase access, particularly where data
acquisition is costly, hidden or publicly unavailable. It can be more salient when
data are already available. But utilising or processing the data requires advanced
quantitative skills to derive information, and bridging potential skills and knowledge
gaps can open up existing data to a much wider audience (Klievink et al. 2018). This
is pertinent for lay populations who, if ODPs are combined with interactive visuali-
sations and resources, can engage with complex data in ways that might otherwise
be unavailable to them. In such cases, value is added through focusing on the needs
of the end users.
Matching or linking records can bring added value to existing databases or
resources. Data linkage is the process of merging two or more independent resources
or databases together based upon matching on a set of shared identifiers (Harron
et al. 2017). Given the inherent costs of producing resources or collecting new data
to investigate a research question, linking two or more existing sources together that
could not answer the question by themselves, but possess all of the necessary infor-
mation between them may provide a more efficient solution (Harron et al. 2017).
Even where data linkage is not the priority, ODPs should be set up to allow future
linkage to other potential resources.
By generating analysis ready data, ODPs bridge the gap between useful but inac-
cessible data and user needs. In doing so, they unlock potential research findings
that derive from analysis that relies on them, and can feed into decision making that
encourage more evidence-based policy making. Geodemographics and other com-
posite indices are an excellent example of adding value to existing datasets. These
approaches manage to leverage information from multiple data sources, deriving

4
The term “Analysis Ready Data” finds its origin in the remote sensing literature. We use it in this con-
text because we believe the challenges and benefits of processing data before they are made available to
end-users are extend well beyond satellite imagery.

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summary measures of the latent information (Green et al. 2018; Vickers and Rees
2007) while preserving the confidentiality of the original data as required.

3.3 Open (geographic) data science

Various sources of new data forms are available in a “half-cooked” state (Spiel-
man 2017). They are not available in a form that would be useful or accessible for
interested stakeholders. For instance, data such as open transport data are available
through convoluted processes (e.g. APIs) that non-technical audiences are not able
to easily access. Others, such as satellite imagery or air quality data, can be down-
loaded easily but their size, complexity and unstructured nature preclude wider use.
Yet, others, such as purchase records from retailers, exist but have restricted access.
Given the accidental nature of many of these data sources (Arribas-Bel 2014), few
undergo thorough quality assurance and assessments for bias, completeness and
statistical representativeness. This is an important feature which differentiates new
forms of data from traditional census and survey-based sources, for which there exist
reliable infrastructure and frameworks for analysis, publication and dissemination.
The “unfinished” nature of new forms of data is a key feature of Data Science
as a discipline. The explosion in the amount, variety and potential uses of new data
has created the need for an interdisciplinary field that combines elements from areas
such as statistics, computer science and information visualisation (Donoho 2017).
Several new forms of data are inherently spatial, so there have been calls to estab-
lish closer links between these disciplines and Geography through GISc (Singleton
and Arribas-Bel 2019), computational (Arribas-Bel and Reades 2018) and quantita-
tive Geography (Arribas-Bel 2018).5This stage of the analysis has become increas-
ingly sophisticated, increasingly with greater use of advanced algorithms and com-
plex pipelines that transform data in useful ways. As an illustration, Stubbings et al.
(2019) developed a green space index by combining street-level imagery, state-of-
the-art deep learning techniques and hierarchical modelling. Dismissing this compo-
nent of every data project as merely “data cleaning” involves several risks. It dimin-
ishes the credit awarded to a step that can crucially influence the final results, which
compels researchers to relegate this key task to short and vague descriptions that
obscure the steps undertaken, with clear implications for openness, transparency and
reproducibility of their research (Brunsdon 2016).
We consider it vital that the (Geographic) Data Science process embedded
in the generation of ODPs be as open and transparent as possible (Brunsdon
and Comber 2020). Three main reasons underpin this requirement. First, as for
open-source software (Raymond 1999), an open approach fosters collaboration,
pooling of resources and avoids duplicating efforts. Second, an open approach
involves an explicit recognition of the limitations of the datasets generated. Third,

5
We argue that, in this context, the term “Geographic Data Science” is more appropriate to capture the
set of practices that we want to refer to. For more details on the motivation, reasoning and justification,
in particular to how this term relates to more established ones such as GIScience or Geocomputation, we
refer the reader to Arribas-Bel and Reades (2018) and Singleton and Arribas-Bel (2019).

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Open data products‑A framework for creating valuable analysis… 505

Fig. 1  The geographic data science stack

an open approach represents a clear message to users about the commitment to

honesty and transparency by the ODP creator. This is an important element. The
code, packages and platforms used to create an ODP will usually be accessed
only by a small fraction of its users. However, the fact that they can be checked
contributes to build user trust, and ultimately to amplify the use and impact of
ODP by attracting a larger user base.
The open approach that we recommend to maximise the impact of ODPs oper-
ates at three layers of the (Geographic) Data Science process: analysis, methods
and infrastructure. Figure 1 shows an overview of what we term the Geographic
Data Science stack. The top layer involves specification of the steps taken to
transform the original input data into a final ODP, which we term ‘analysis’. In
this context, the growing usage of computer code in research allows for the full
documentation and evaluation of how products are developed (Brunsdon 2016).
An open approach requires that the code generating the final dataset from the ini-
tial one(s) is available in both machine and human readable form. An increasingly
popular format to meet this requirement within scientific communities is the com-
putational notebook, such as Jupyter notebooks (Rule et al. 2019) or Rmarkdown
notebooks (Casado-Díaz et al. 2017; Koster and Rowe 2019). In cases where
commercial interest and copyright law prevents code sharing, so-called pseudo
code with enough detail to reproduce the steps can be an acceptable compromise.
Code released in the analysis stage should be specifically tailored to the develop-
ment of the ODP. A good illustration of this approach is the Open SIMD pro-
ject to expand on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (https://​github.​com/​
TheDa​taLab​Scotl​and/​openS​IMD).
The second layer involves methods. More generalisable code to implement a
technique that could be applied in different contexts is relegated to this level. In
this case, an open approach requires methods to be packaged as an open-source
software library and released following standard software engineering practices
(e.g. version control and continuous integration; Wolf, Oshan & Rey 2019). This
division between analysis-specific code in notebooks and more modular code
into packages avoids duplication of effort and increases the clarity with which
the analysis is presented. Both R (CRAN) and Python (Conda-forge) are good

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examples of community approaches to support packages; similarly, projects such

as scikit-learn (Pedregosa et al. 2011) or the Tidyverse federation of packages
(Wickham et al. 2019) are good illustrations of open source packages.
The third layer comprises infrastructure. The growing complexity of modern
software stacks and analysis pipelines requires open access to analysis and meth-
ods used, as well as the infrastructure on which the development of ODPs has been
based be transparently detailed. In this context, ODPs can borrow from several
advances in software development to make the data available. A prominent example
is containerisation, the technology underpinning projects like Docker or Singularity,
that allows to isolate the computational environment required to reproduce a set of
commands. The gds_env project (Arribas-Bel 2019) provides an illustration for the
case of GDS.
Full reproducibility may not always be possible or even desirable. For example,
sensitive input data may not be amenable for sharing due to disclosure risks. We
argue that as much of the process from start to finish should be made available,
especially when there are few barriers against it. The purpose of an ODP is to design
products that add value to existing data through opening up opportunities within
data that are messy or unable to be openly shared.
A good example of the value of open geographic data science can be found in
the geodemographics literature. Many of the original classifications were created by
the private sector, where full disclosure of the underlying methods and data input
is not always be possible given associated commercial sensitivity or intellectual
property. Such an approach has drawn criticism as being “black box” (Singleton and
Longley 2009). Arguably, this poses an acute issue for applications in the public
sector, especially where life outcomes are at stake (Longley 2005). Responding to
these concerns, there has been movement towards creating geodemographics that
are more open to scrutiny. Under the umbrella of Open Geodemographics, several
classifications that are fully reproducible have been created in countries such as the
UK (Vickers and Rees 2007; Gale et al. 2016; Martin et al. 2018) and US (Spielman
and Singleton 2015). In these instances, code and data are disseminated openly, and
these academic outputs also have associated journal articles in the peer reviewed
literature. Such an approach was made possible through all of the data integral to
these classifications being disseminated with open licences and enabling reuse and
redistribution.6More recent research also discusses alternative reproducible methods
that might also be applicable when data are sourced with wider and more restrictive
licensing arrangements where full reproducibility was not possible (Singleton and
Longley 2019).

6
For example, the 2011 ONS Output Area Classification has a formal page on the Office for National
Statistics website here: https://​www.​ons.​gov.​uk/​metho​dology/​geogr​aphy/​geogr​aphic​alpro​ducts/​areac​lassi​
ficat​ions/​2011a​reacl​assif​i cati​ons.

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Open data products‑A framework for creating valuable analysis… 507

3.4 Outreach

The mantra ‘build it and they will come’ should not be the outcome of ODP devel-
opment. Successful dissemination, circulation and impact should not rely on chance.
Outreach activities and resources are required to encourage end users to engage with
a product. These activities should be designed to guide end users on the use of the
ODP. A full review of various forms of outreach activities is beyond the scope of the
paper, we focus on two main dissemination channels. It is important to recognise
that several of these practices closely relate to and take inspiration from a variety
of literatures, including those of participatory GIS (Dunn 2007) and citizen science
(e.g. Haklay 2013).
A first key channel is user-focused events. These serve the purpose of refining
and promoting a product. They can involve small, focused events such as workshops
with stakeholders or lay community groups, and larger public promotion campaigns.
Online presence and social media can play an important role in accessing wider
coverage if supported with resources and materials. Project-specific social media
accounts and online presence are increasingly more common. For example, the
European Commission devotes an entire website to different aspects of their Global
Human Settlement open data product.7Partnerships can also assist in the outreach
process, especially when ODPs are designed to address a particular problem. For
example, the “Access to Healthy Assets and Hazards” project (AHAH, Green et al.
2018) partnered with Public Health England (PHE) to make some of the data avail-
able through PHE’s Public Health Profiles resource. Co-designing an ODP requires
engagement and co-development of project ideas with end users at every step so
that the impact of ODP is maximised. Singleton and Longley (2019) co-developed
a bespoke workplace classification in close collaboration with the Greater London
Authority (GLA). The ODP is now available openly through the Consumer Data
Research Centre’s data repository,8, and the GLA is using it for internal operations.
A second major channel involves the use of open-source platforms, software and
resources. The integration of these assets is key to ensure interaction and engage-
ment of end users with the ODPs, and a key principle is to facilitate end users with
non-technical skills to interact with ODPs. Data stores comprise a useful example to
make available ODPs and associated meta-data. Publishing all technical details, ana-
lytical code and documentation is important so that users can evaluate how ODPs
were created and refine the project pipeline (see Paez et al. 2020, for an example
of extensively documented data processes). Open-source platforms can help with
this process, for example, CKAN for publishing open data, or GitHub for sharing
code. Complementing these platforms should be the use of interactive resources
that improve the accessibility and usability of ODPs. Examples of this approach
include AHAH or the classification developed by Rowe et al. (2018) to analyse the
trajectory of socio-economic inequality at the neighbourhood level in UK. These
resources comprise an interactive web mapping tool that has been used by the

7
https://​ghsl.​jrc.​ec.​europa.​eu/​datas​ets.​php.
8
http://​data.​cdrc.​ac.​uk/​datas​et/​london-​workp​lace-​zone-​class​ifica​tion.

13
508 D. Arribas‑Bel et al.

general public and policy makers to point and click to their local areas and engage
with the resource, as well as allow more technical users to download and analyse the
information.
Journals have also emerged as a key mechanism for the explicit dissemina-
tion of ODPs. Innovative examples include Data in Brief,9 Scientific Data10 or
REGION,11which publish papers explicitly focused on ODPs rather than focused on
research from which a side product is an ODP. In doing so, they seek to promote
the creation, sharing and reuse of scientific data. Papers are peer reviewed and pub-
lished under an open license. This form of publication is useful as it provides essen-
tial context, describing how ODPs have been generated as well as assessing their
limitations and identifying potential purposes for the reuse of generated ODPs (e.g.
Rowe et al. 2017), all elements hard to cover on a traditional research paper. Jour-
nals, such as REGION, have also started publishing computational notebooks, and a
key aim is their added value in communicating and disseminating ODPs (Koster and
Rowe 2019). Notebooks offer interactivity with the potential to engage policy, disci-
pline-specific or local knowledge experts with data analysis exploration (Rowe et al.
2020). This in turn can enable the identification of new relevant patterns or uses that
may have not been reported or explicitly discussed in the original publication. These
novel ways of publication provide an incentive for researchers to generate ODPs.
Outreach does not mark the end of developing ODPs. It is a continual and circu-
lar process that should incorporate constant evaluation and refinements to a product.
Ideally, as data are updated, new relevant sources become available, and feedback
from end users is gathered, they should be incorporated to refine ODPs. Outreach
should therefore be designed to maximise this refinement process, facilitating feed-
back generation from relevant users.
Examples of outreach into stakeholders and users can be found in geodemograph-
ics. Spielman and Singleton (2015) and Patias et al. (2019) produced open classifi-
cations for the US and UK, respectively. Through further interaction, engagement
and outreach, the Location intelligence company Carto12 has integrated them into
their portfolio of data offerings. For the initial release of the US classification, only
a description of the group level (ten clusters) was included, but Carto developed
new labels for the 55 cluster type level, making these available within the public
domain, alongside integration into their mapping platform,13used by industry and
government. Thanks to this effort, the original classifications are openly accessible
via their API and can be viewed within an interactive map improving their ease of
access, engagement and dissemination.
ODP development and outreach has also been instrumental in supporting
responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the Local Data Spaces project

9
https://​www.​journ​als.​elsev​ier.​com/​data-​in-​brief/.
10
https://​www.​nature.​com/​sdata/.
11
https://​openj​ourna​ls.​wu-​wien.​ac.​at/​ojs/​index.​php/​region/.
12
https://​carto.​com.
13
The Carto blog describing the work can be found here: https://​carto.​com/​blog/​demog​raphic-​clust​ers-​
segme​ntati​on-​data-​obser​vatory/.

13
Open data products‑A framework for creating valuable analysis… 509

in the UK saw researchers working with Local Government practitioners to co-pro-

duce data insights using data held in secure and centralised researcher data environ-
ments (Leech et al. 2021). The aim was to help Local Authorities access these data
directly or undertake research on their behalf, allowing them to gain data insights
from data they did not have access to (including timely COVID-19 data deposited by
the Office for National Statistics (ONS) not available elsewhere). Through contin-
ual repeated meetings with the team, researchers were able to co-design how Local
Authorities wanted ODPs shared. Short computational notebooks were one solu-
tion, embedding descriptive data analyses as ‘conversation starters’ to show what
data insights could be produced and help Local Authorities see the ‘art of possi-
ble’ (rather than sharing analysis ready data initially). For example, through sharing
notebooks mapping asymptomatic COVID-19 test site accessibility in Liverpool,
Liverpool City Council asked where to locate new sites and the team were able then
focus on generating optimised locations to improve access (Green 2021). The added
value of using notebooks meant that any analysis run for a Local Authority could be
replicated for any other the local area resulting in all Local Authorities benefitting
from insights during the co-production process.

4 Challenges

Open Data are a good example of a Public Good, being both “non-rivalrous” and
“non-excludable.” Open Data are, however, not free. There are direct costs associ-
ated with their collection, extraction, preparation and release; alongside indirect
costs such as the loss of potential income that might be realised through alterna-
tive licensing models (Singleton et al. 2016; Johnson et al. 2017). Moreover, their
consumption does not necessarily contribute to their production. For example, we
might use OpenStreetMap data and services, but never commit any new geographic
features or corrections to this open map system. Although some costs might be
argued as being written off over time, others remain in perpetuity such as the cost
of data hosting or download bandwidth. Issues of this nature which are associated
with Open Data are generally enhanced when they are productised, given the addi-
tional human resource burden required in their creation, and the generation of nec-
essary meta data or reporting associated with their release, such as extensive tech-
nical briefings, or the preparation of linked academic publications. As with Open
Data, the “value” of an ODP is not realised directly (as it is free at the point of
use), and to balance production costs, this would only likely to occur if these envel-
oped accounting of indirect benefits. For example, within some sectors where fund-
ing may be limited, an ODP might replace limited or no insight; potentially return-
ing various economic or social benefits. Where funding is less constrained, ODPs
may add value vis-a-vis commercial offerings if the insights generated are unique
or complementary (Johnson et al. 2017). Capturing such value in both instances is
however complex and lies somewhat outside the scope of this paper. However, given
the costs of Open Data and those additional burdens of ODPs, there does need to be
strategic planning and thought associated with creating ODPs. We would argue that
some strategies that have been adopted by the Open Source Software community

13
510 D. Arribas‑Bel et al.

might be applicable within the context of an ODP. This might include the sponsor-
ship of ODPs by organisations who are benefiting from their availability, or the inte-
gration of ODPs into commercial software as a service platform (e.g. API). More
specifically, organisations developing ODPs, might also supply these within a ‘free-
mium’ model where enhanced versions of ODPs might be provided as commercial
offerings.
The creation of ODPs share similarities to those ways in which open source soft-
ware are produced. It has been argued that major contributions to many open source
software packages are in fact mostly a result of contributions from a more limited set
of developers (Krishnamurthy 2005). In a similar vein, many ODPs are created as a
result of individuals or very focused teams. As with open software where there are a
narrow set of contributors, this creates a challenge for how ODPs can be maintained
and updated over time. Low diversity in teams developing Open Source Software
(OSS) has also been suggested to hinder creativity and productivity (Giuri et al.
2010), which we would also argue is applicable to ODPs. Given these issues with
OSS,one way in which they can be sustained is through code sharing platforms, such
as Github or Bitbucket, where new developers can find out about software, make
contributions or fork developments (Peng 2011). We argue that such platforms are
equally useful for the sharing of code and data associated with the development of
ODPs. However, they are not designed specifically for this purpose, and in essence,
features are repurposed from the software developer community. The size of data
that can be shared within such platforms is often limited, and where more exten-
sive storage is required, this becomes an increasing cost burden. Although explicit
data sharing platforms have emerged (e.g. figshare.com, zenodo.org, datadryad.org,
dataverse.harvard.edu), these tend to focus on dissemination or archiving rather than
development. Such platforms are useful for the promotion of ODPs, but are limited
in functionality to support the process of remixing or update (Singleton et al. 2016).
We would argue that there is space for new platforms with features that are better
tailored to the needs of ODP development, and much like Github or Bitbucket might
reward users through public profiles detailing their contributions to different ODPs.
The extent to which any community of ODP developers might be formalised and
developed akin to those established within OSS will be challenging given the posi-
tioning of this emergent area (Harris et al. 2014; Arribas-Bel 2018; Arribas-Bel and
Reades 2018; Singleton and Arribas-Bel 2019). Such issues are accentuated within
our current university curricula. Within the Quantitative Social Sciences and Statis-
tics, focus tends to favour theory and applications of statistical models. Although the
processes of software development are considered within Computer Science, these
focus on applications rather the use of code in development of ODPs. Moreover,
the recent rapid growth of Data Science has so far emphasised visualisation and
new modelling techniques from the cannon of machine learning and artificial intel-
ligence. We argue that there is clearly a role for the better embedding of ODP devel-
opment both within curricula bearing components of Data Science.
Finally, for those involved in the production of knowledge through research,
historically there would be limited value ascribed to the considerable extra efforts
required to package and document outputs from research as ODPs (Singleton et al.
2016). Within systems where impact is valued or measured, we argue that this might

13
Open data products‑A framework for creating valuable analysis… 511

support engagement for the development of ODPs given their utility as a route to
stakeholder engagement.

5 Conclusion

This paper introduces the concept of Open Data Product as a construct that lowers
barriers for a wider audience of stakeholders to access and benefit from the (geo-)
data revolution. The value in framing the challenge of making sense of new forms of
data through ODPs resides in its comprehensive approach. We focus neither exclu-
sively on technical issues, such as the current big data discourse; nor on govern-
ance and outreach solely, such as more traditional open data notions. Instead, ODPs
recognise that turning disparate, unstructured and often sensitive data sources into
useful and accessible information for a wider audience of stakeholders requires a
combination of computational, statistical and social efforts. In doing so, we contrib-
ute to the Open Data literature by providing a framework that expands the notion of
how Open Data can be generated and what can constitute the basis to generate open
datasets, as well as how to ensure its final usability and reliability.
Although not fully developed in this paper, we see a clear parallel between ODPs
and the role that open-source software played in democratising access to cutting
edge methods and computational power in the 90 s and 2000s. Three decades ago,
a series of technological advances such as the advent of personal computing and
rapid increase of computational power (e.g. Moore’s Law) provided fertile ground
for experimentation in the domain of spatial analysis. Initially, however, this field
of experimentation was hampered by a landscape dominated by proprietary soft-
ware that was restrictive to access. Besides the obvious monetary cost, commercial
software restricted access to methodological innovations as it used to be oriented
to profitable market areas. In this context, OSS contributed significantly to unlock
much of the potential of new computers and helped spur an era of new research that
would have not been possible otherwise.14
We see data, rather than computation, as the defining feature of the present tech-
nological context. To make the most of new forms of data, we need more than “just”
OSS; hence the proposal for ODPs in this paper. However, we would also like to
stress the relevance and crucial role that OSS has to play in a world where “raw
data” are so distant from an “analysis ready data”. As highlighted above, ODPs can
only succeed through a transparent process that can build trust among end-users.
Without the ability that currently only OSS provides to access cutting-edge tech-
niques and do so in a transparent way, it is difficult to imagine successful ODPs.
Rather than definitive, our hope for this paper is to be provocative. The current data
landscape is in transition and is very likely that several innovations are still in the not-
so-distant horizon. Hence, the notion of ODP will necessarily be an evolving one that

14
For a practical illustration of this statement, the reader is advised to examine the number of published
papers that actively cite open-source software projects such as GeoDa (Anselin, Syabri & Kho; 2006);
R’s spdep (Bivand et al. 2011); or PySAL (Rey & Anselin 2010).

13
512 D. Arribas‑Bel et al.

adapts to changing conditions to remain useful and valuable. At any rate, we envision
the need for novel approaches and mindsets such as those described in this paper only
to increase in the coming years. There is much that the spatial analysis community
holds to contribute to exploit the data deluge that is rapidly changing every aspect of
society. New ways to communicate and deliver our collective advances in data intel-
ligence and expertise to maximise societal impact are needed. We hope the ideas pre-
sented in this paper partially shape the agenda and, more generally, contribute to a
wider conversation about our role in shaping this new world in the making.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as
you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Com-
mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article
are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the
material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is
not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://​creat​iveco​mmons.​org/​licen​
ses/​by/4.​0/.

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