The transformative promises and potential of Big and Open Data are substantial for e-government services, openness and transparency, governments, and the interaction between governments, citizens, and the business sector. From "smart" government to transformational government, Big and Open Data can foster collaboration; create real-time solutions to challenges in agriculture, health, transportation, and more; promote greater openness; and usher in a new era of policy-and decision-making. There are, however, a range of policy challenges to address regarding Big and Open Data, including access and dissemination; digital asset management, archiving and preservation; privacy; and security. After presenting a discussion of the open data policies that serve as a foundation for Big Data initiatives, this paper examines the ways in which the current information policy framework fails to address a number of these policy challenges. It then offers recommendations intended to serve as a beginning point for a revised policy framework to address significant issues raised by the U.S. government's engagement in Big Data efforts.Open Data policies and programs are at the center of the Obama administration's efforts to promote access, openness, and transparency [3,4,13,23]. Open Data is based on the idea that certain kinds of data should exist beyond the limits of copyright, patents, censorship, or other parameters often placed around data. Data is disseminated openly so that it is freely available to use, republish, and transform into new products. In a government context, Open Data creates opportunities for individuals, private sector organizations, and non-profits to find new insights in and create new products and services from the data [2,3]. An Open Data set can be of any size; however, many of the key Open Data initiatives championed by the Obama administration have involved Big Data -datasets that are extremely large and/or complex, offering the possibilities of identifying previously impossible levels of insights, granularity of analysis, and relationships between elements in the dataset. Big Data sets have become possible due to recent increases storage and processing capacity, as well as increases in the number of devices collecting and sharing data. Big Data require three key infrastructure ingredients: 1) a platform for organizing, storing, and making data accessible; 2) computing technology and power that can process large-scale datasets; and 3) data formats that are structured and usable. As they are typically so large that they exceed the capabilities of personal computing, Big Data sets generally are stored on large numbers of servers. Moreover, Big Data span a range of data types such as text, numeric, image, video, or combinations thereof, and they can cross multiple data platforms such as social media networks, blog files, sensors, location data from smart phones, digitized documents, and photograph and video archives.Big Data are being widely used by governments to identify and analyze problems, as well as to...
