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Thing 2: Dabbling in Open Data - musings over an afternoon cuppa

For the past 14 months I've been working on secondment as an administrative civil servant in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and not as a librarian at all. The area I have been involved in is that of progressing the Irish Government's Open Data Initiative. The area was new to me so it was quite a challenge to get up to speed quickly. The definition of Open Data is that it is data that can be freely used, re-used and re-distributed by anyone, subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike. See opendatahandbook.org/guide/en/what-is-open-data ? The thrust of the Government's Open Data Initiative is to encourage the release and publication of Public Bodies' data as open data in appropriate machine readable formats and under an open licence with a view to encouraging its use and re-use by all stakeholders.  To facilitate discovery of this data, a national Open Data Portal at data.gov.ie has been created which provides a single poin