Liberation of public data: Exploring central themes in open government data and freedom of information research

This paper conducts a comparative literature survey of Open Government Data (OGD) and Freedom of Information (FOI), with a view to tracking the central themes in the two civil society campaigns. With seeming similarities and a growing popularity in research, the major themes framing research on the two movements have not clearly emerged. Topic modelling, text mining and document analysis methods are used to extract the themes as well as key named entities. The topics are subsequently labeled and with expert guidance, their semantic meaning are provided. The results indicate that the major theme in FOI research borders on issues relating to disclosure, publishing, access and cost of requests. On the other hand, themes in OGD research have largely centered on technology and related concepts. The approach also helped in determining key similarities and differences in the two campaigns as reported in research.