Open source software development has been practiced for years now. A prominent case is the Linux ecosystem.

A more recent, at the moment rapidly increasing trend is the open data movement. That is currently encouraged in Finland even at the governmental level. The premise is that by making public data sources (e.g., geographical information databases) openly accessible (without licence fees), new products and services could be innovated by smaller organizations and various communities in addition to larger, established business enterprises. 

Such advances bring up many new opportunities for software development. However, there are also new considerations and possibly unforeseen constraints to be taken into account for the software projects. Certain specific research questions are then as follows:

• What advantageous could be done with the currently open data sources?
  • new product/services?
  • improving existing processes (e.g., business process automation)?
  • entirely new business models and ways of working?
• Would it be possible to combine multiple different data sources (possibly both open and proprietary ones) in some new, beneficial ways?
• How to locate (relevant) open data sources (even dynamically)?
• How to take such data sources into account in the software development process (e.g., heterogenous interfaces)?
• What specific requirements should be considered for the software specifications (e.g., data availability, trustworthiness)?
• How do the various data sources (possibly governed by totally different organizations) affect the future maintenance of the software systems depending on them?