Open Data : It’s About Interoperability, not Property is a post on Common Knowledge that does a great job at not only explaining why Open Data is such a powerful idea, but also why it is so complex, as well:
“There are three interlocking dimensions to interoperability in data: legal, technical, and semantic. By legal, we mean the contractual and intellectual property rights associated with the data; by technical, the standard systems (especially the computer languages) in which the data is published; and by semantic, the actual meaning of the data itself – what it describes, and how it relates to the broader world.
Each of these dimensions is complex on its own. Taken together, the three represent unsolvable complexity….”
