The Open Government Partnership, a partnership of national governments launched in 2011 with the aim of promoting open government in the member countries and collaborating on multi-lateral agreements and best practices. It covers also open data.

Open Database Licence, an attempt to create an open licence for data which covers the ‘database rights’ as well as copyright itself. It does this by imposing contractual obligations on the data re-user.

Open Data Readiness Assessment, a framework created by the World Bank for assessing the opportunities, obstacles and next steps to be taken in a country (especially a developing country) considering publishing government data as open data.

Source: ODH

A principle of the OD Directive and PSI Directive requiring that any applicable conditions for the re-use of documents are non-discriminatory for comparable categories of re-use, including for cross-border re-use, and limiting the possibilities of exclusive rights. 

A restriction, as part of a licence, that content cannot be freely re-used for ‘commercial’ purposes. Content or data subject to a non-commercial restriction is not open, according to the Open Definition. Such a restriction reduces economic value and causes problems with licence mixing, as well as often ruling out more than is intended (for example, it is often unclear whether educational uses are ‘commercial’).

Used to denote that the holder of copyright or database rights waive all their interest in their data worldwide. May not be applicable in all legal systems.

Source: Creative Commons.

Non-governmental organisation. NGOs are voluntary, non-profit organisations focussing on charitable work, community-building, campaigning, research, etc, making up a vital part of civil society.

Source: ODH

The Metadata Registry is an important interoperability and standardisation tool. It registers and maintains definition data (metadata elements, named authority lists, schemas, etc.) used by the different EU institutions.

Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use or manage an information resource. Metadata is often called data about data.

The additional cost incurred by supplying a single copy of a resource, e.g. data. For data to be open according to the Open Definition, it must be charged for at no more than marginal cost. Where data is available for download over the internet the marginal cost will usually be zero. There may be a small marginal cost in exceptional cases, e.g. if for reasons of size the data needs to be put on a disk and posted.