The GNU General Public License is a free, “copyleft” license for software and other kinds of works in a sense that it protects the freedoms – the rights - of users of thus licensed software instead of focusing on the moral and material rights of authors within the recognized and almost universally accepted framework of copyright and neighbouring rights.

Geographical Information System, any computer system designed to read, display, analyse and manipulate geodata.

Source: ODH

Key EU legislation on the personal data protection and privacy. The General Data Protection Regulation (EU)2016/679 is in force since May 2018 in the EU and EEA countries. It aims to give the individuals control over their personal data, requires all data controllers to establish procedures and safeguards, and is very strict towards breaches committed by private companies.

As defined by the OD Directive, ‘formal open standard’ means a standard which has been laid down in written form, detailing specifications for the requirements on how to ensure software interoperability.

Source: OD Directive

‘Friend of a friend’ is a machine-readable descriptive vocabulary of persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.

A rating system for open data proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web. To score the maximum five stars, data must (1) be available on the Web under an open licence, (2) be in the form of structured data, (3) be in a non-proprietary file format, (4) use URIs as its identifiers (see also RDF), (5) include links to other data sources (see linked data). To score 3 stars, it must satisfy all of (1)-(3), etc.

The description of how a file is represented on a computer disk. The format usually corresponds to the last part of the file name (‘extension’), e.g. a file in CSV format might be called schools-list.csv. The file format refers to the internal format of the file, not how it is displayed to users. E.g.

Data meeting the concepts of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, defined as a set of more detailed measurable principles. Designed with the scientific data reusability in mind, FAIR principles put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals. While FAIR data can also be open data, this might not be true in every case.

In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert and represents one of the current applicable results of machine learning and a possible step towards development of Artificial Intelligence.

The legal situation in which one user has an exclusive right to re-use a dataset, excluding others from such a re-use. The OD Directive in general prohibits the of exclusive arrangements making the re-use of documents open to all potential actors in the market, even if one or more market actors already exploit added-value products based on those documents.