Big and Open Linked Data (BOLD) in research, policy, and practice

The value of data as a new economic asset class is seldom realized on its own. With less reliance on self-administered survey, it offers new insights into behaviors and patterns. Yet, it involves a huge undertaking of bringing together multiple actors from different disciplines and diverse practices to examine the underexplored relationships between types of data. There are different inquiry systems and research cycles to make sense out of big and open data (BOLD). We argue that deploying theories from diverse disciplines, and considering using different inquiry systems and research cycles, offers a more disciplined and robust methodological approach. This allows us to break through the limits of backward induction from the evidence by moving back and forward in exploring the unknown through BOLD. As such, we call for developing a variety of rigorous approaches to counterbalance the current theory-free practice in the analysis and use of BOLD.