The Open Knowledge Index has been designed to measure and track progress in opening up information, data and knowledge in a broader sense to the public. The Open Knowledge Index captures three dimensions of knowledge – the ability to access knowledge (capability), the availability of knowledge and data provision (legislation) and the capacity to use the data and feed it back into the open data eco-system (open society).
Currently, the sample consists of a cross-section of 38 countries in 2009-2010, comprising OECD and the BRIC countries. We plan to gradually increase the sample in the future.
Table of contents
According to the Open Knowledge Index, Norway ranks number one in terms of Open Knowledge, followed by Finland, Sweden and Iceland. Among the OECD countries, we find Chile, Turkey and Mexico at the lower end. China performs worst among the BRIC countries.
As many indicators of social progress, the Open Knowledge Index is positively correlated with income, as proxied by GDP per capita. The correlation coefficient between the Open Knowledge Index and (log) GDP per capita is 0.75. GDP per capita, however, explains only roughly half of the variation in the Open Knowledge Index (measured by R-squared).
The OKI is also positively correlated with country-wide happiness per country.
Finally, if we break down the Open Knowledge Indicator into its three subdimensions we find a high correlation between the ranking of the subindices especially in the upper and lower ranks. Note that in this computation the overall Open Knowledge Indicator gives equal weights to each of the three dimensions it captures.
Here is the information currently available above to download in a frozen table. If you find anything interesting using this data, please let us know!
