With the transition of governments to e-governments, the latest measure of ensuring transparency and accountability is through providing more and more access to government data which was hitherto reserved in “silos”. This is the process entailed in "Open Governments" and the data thus opened freely is called "Open Government Data" (OGD). The transition of traditional governments to e-governments has been amply covered in extant literature. However, Open Government is regarded as the final culmination of e-government in a bid to restore public accountability and promote transparency in government besides forging government-citizen ties. In this paper, the nature and scope of OGD of Oman is being investigated. Also, the facilitating and hindering factors in tapping OGD are being discussed in the paper. The paper concludes with directions for further research and academic-cum-practitioner implications. The originality of the paper lies in the fact that the nature and scope of OGD has not been investigated in detail as far as Oman is concerned-the present study seeks to plug this gap.

With the transition of governments to e-governments, the latest measure of ensuring transparency and accountability is through providing more and more access to government data which was hitherto reserved in “silos”. This is the process entailed in "Open Governments" and the data thus opened freely...