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Open Data

Definition

Government or institutional data released in a structured, machine-readable format for public download and reuse, usually through a dedicated portal.

Related terms

Administrative Data
Records generated by an agency, such as police, courts or prisons, as a by-product of its operational work, later reused for research...
Cohort Study
A longitudinal design that follows the same defined group of people, typically sharing a birth year or an event, over an extended...
Record Linkage
Matching records belonging to the same individual across separate datasets, using a shared identifier or probabilistic matching on fields like name and...
Secondary Data
Data collected by someone else for a different purpose and reanalysed by a researcher asking a new question of it.
Dark Figure of Crime
The gap between the actual volume of crime and the amount recorded in official statistics. Crimes go unrecorded when victims do not...
Data Quality
How complete, accurate and consistently classified a dataset is, which shapes what conclusions it can support.
Digital Trace Data
Records generated automatically as a by-product of online or networked activity, such as social media posts or platform server logs.
Longitudinal Design
A study that collects data on the same units at more than one point in time, as opposed to a single-wave cross-sectional...

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