I sometimes think, that a lot more data sources should be publicly available. In some cases, it is quite interesting why this is not the case.

Two very interesting examples of that are Gas station information and TV program information.

Gas Station information

In Germany, the gas prices are regulated centrally by the Markttransparenzstelle Kraftstoff (MTS-K) in a way that every gas station has to communicate its prices to it. Access to this data via this authority is exclusively available to licensed fuel price information services (Spritpreis-Informationsdienste).

So in theory it is possible to get access to the official dataset directly, so we need to use something like Tankerkoenig which provides a free API instead of the ad-based services and apps which are available.

But this has still limitations and is based on the good will of a commercial service which provides API service to a dataset which should be publicly available…

TV Program Information

Another dataset is information about the TV program.

Of course one can just look the information up on the TV channels web page, but an aggregation is of course also a desire of the public. Yet, the news channels have the copyright on this information, which can therefore not be publicly shared and made available for free.

Also in this case, a few volunteers created a service and application to provide free access in form of a cross-platform application to view and update the electronic program guide. Generally, this is great, but services provided by people in their free time also create a burden if not maintained anymore.

This is the case with the TV-Browser-App - as there is still not a maintained application which provides an open source and ad-free EPG to mobile devices. There is only another app which does not offer an open-source version due to the dependence on tracking and payment solutions.

There somehow is not even a webpage which contains EPG information for free.

Weather forecast information

Another example of this is of course weather forecast information which is paid for by the public which finances the Deutsche Wetter Dienst. But WetterOnline sued the free version of the public weather data provider - and the judication did indeed forbid the free version.

This is a worsening of the situation at the expense of the public.

Energy generation and demand Dataset

Another example is the data which is provided by the ENTSO-E which is licensed under a not completely open-data license as you are not allowed to redistribute the dataset, so every user has to download it by itself. The dataset contains electricity generation and demand data of all European countries.

Summary

So we have four different cases which make it hard to use the public data sets:

1. the public institution does not want to provide public API access and delegates this task to closed providers
2. Copyright problems with the public data sets
3. Weird law on market competition for free state-financed providers
4. Copyright and weird data reuse license

It would really be beneficial for the public if such data sets would be available under a FAIR license.