Editorial: Special Issue on Collaborative Aspects of Open Data in Software EngineeringJohan

TL;DR

This editorial emphasizes the importance of open data in software engineering, discussing collaborative benefits, challenges, and current practices, while introducing four related papers in the special issue.

Contribution

It provides an overview of collaborative open data in software engineering and introduces new research on its benefits and challenges.

Findings

Open data enhances software engineering processes.

Collaborative open data faces challenges like data quality and privacy.

Current practices show promising benefits of open data in industry.

Abstract

High-quality data has become increasingly important to software engineers in designing and implementing today's software, for example, as an input to machine-learning algorithms and visualisation- and analytics-based features. Open data - i.e., data shared under a licence that gives users the right to study, process, and distribute the data to anyone and for any purpose - offers a mechanism to address this need. Data may originate from multiple sources, whether crowdsourced, shared by government agencies, or shared between commercial entities, and is undoubtedly inherent to all business and revenue models across the public sector, business and industry today. In this guest editorial for the Special Issue on Collaborative Aspects of Open Data in Software Engineering, we explore the collaborative aspects of open data in software engineering. We highlight how these aspects can benefit organisations, what challenges may exist and how these may be addressed based on current practice, and introduce the four papers included in this special issue.