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W kat is Open Data and How to Benęfit front It \ Opon Data - czym są i jak z nich korzystać 45

centralized or distributed architecture. The centralized option ensures the security of the Open Data. In that case all hardware and software elements of the platform may be installed in the data center of the institution exposing the data. On the other hand, it is a considerable challenge to make such an environment productive and fully available. The performance may be improved mainly through the enhancement of the resources (that is via additional servers, databases, network devices), which is an expensive solution. Another approach is a distributed system. In this case the elements of the system may be situated in different places and with various entities being located in so-called cloud. As a result, Open Data is available in different places in the networked environment, which on the one hand solves the problem of performance, but on the other hand makes the users face the challenge of keeping stored data up-to-date in the distributed environment. This requires the development of tools for synchronizing data with the primary source.

Another matter to be considered is the compliance with the standards and IT protocols used for the data exposure. In order to make data reusable and easy to use in web portals, applications and systems, the programming interfaces known as API (Application Program-ming Interface) should act as data carriers. The data repository using the API can provide the end user with the data represented via the most popular Internet protocols, such as HTT P (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or LDAP (Lightweiglu Directory Access Protocol). Ihese protocols usually send text data. However, the user may also take advantage of less popular protocols (e.g. binary protocols) which are morę difli-cult to implement but ofier better security and compression of transmitted information.

The contemporary trends prove that in the majority of cases the platforms exposing bo tli Open API and Open Data use Web Services technologies based on HTTP protocol. However, another issue arises at this point, namely Web Services (WS) exist in two different models. One of them is strictly related to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the case of which web services take advantage of SOAP protocol and service semantics written in WSDh specification (Newcomer, 2003). Slightly simpler attitude is proposed by the RESTful architectural style (Richardson et. al. 2013) which is based on the Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA), where the access to the service (e.g. to the Open Data) is gained through URL (Uniform Resource Locator) resources and methods in HTTP protocol (such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).

Another topie demanding attention appears here, i.e. the format of the data itself as exposed by Web Services. Simple data can be displayed in a text format, e.g. Comma Sepa-rated Values (CSV), or in the key-value format, but also with the help of XML (Newcomer, 2003) and JSON¹ (Rockford, 2009) notations.

When dealing with complex data types containing, for instance, graphics, the way of ex-posing such content by Web Services must allow for the simple download of such objeets. The instances of such data types are the Geographic Information System (GIS) records representing maps which are provided via e.g. Web Map Service protocol (WMS).

The application of open protocols and standards presented in this section facilitates both the exposure of Open Data and the creation of applications using it. The accessibility of SDK sets (Software Development Kit) accelerates and simplifies the job of the programmers even further. SDK modules, available for particular programming environments (Java,