Next illustration shows the main agents and tools being part of the value chain of PSI reuse.
Publishers
The first agents in the value chain are the sources of data (Fuentes in the illustration). These can be public, or private, dividing the latter into for-profit organizations (companies) or without (foundations and NGOs).
The first challenge for these producers is how to get funding from their publishing activities. Pollock identifies three main ones, but not mutually exclusive, sources for the public bodies responsible for publishing PSI (Pollock, 2008). However, only two of them are really generalized. First one is the Government funding: fund from general government (or local ones) revenues and second one is user funding: charge those who use/ download/ access the dataset. A mix of both approaches is also generalized. A specific analysis of charging policies for trading funds can be found in Newbery et al article (Newbery et al, 2008).
As a result, different charging policies can be applied, from those, in which entities try to maximize their profits (in fact trying to be sustainable and not to depend on public budgets), to those who only charge as much as they have to reach a break even situation, and those who only charge a marginal cost (most cases zero for a digital access to the information). These last ones basically correspond with the entities that count on with a public budget for publishing the information and, at the same time, are the responsible entities which are forced to publish their information as a result of a legal obligation.
Different charging policies impact on the quality of data released and in the adoption of innovations in the publishing entities.
Legal and technical frameworks
The second agent in this value chain is legal and technical frameworks. They enable information reuse and include the regulations that promote publication, the public charging policies, the legal licensing of PSI, the mechanisms to access to information, privacy restrictions, etc.
There is also a whole infrastructure of technological regulations, data normalization, meta-data enrichment, etc. Public administration plays a key role here, because it is not only the monopoly of publishing information but it is also the regulator of its potential uses.
It is worthwhile to note that the geo-referenced information (which possesses the most worldwide adopted standards) is also the type of information that provides the biggest economic impact according to PIRA (PIRA, 2000). Causality analysis for this relation is identified as a future research line. Next illustration shows the Economic Value of Public Sector Information from this reference and from (MEPSIR, 2006).
Infomediaries
The infomediaries are the creators of the products and services based on the published sources. Just as data sources, these entities can be public, private or third sector and, therefore, their objectives can range from mere profit interest, to the development of society itself, or the promotion of transparency or participation, among others.
Apps, services and derived information
Based on these data, infomediaries can generate either new data sets through treatment and combination, mobile applications for tablets or other devices, or purely services, either available online or as a consulting service.
Users
The users are part of the last link in this chain. These users can be citizens (adopting free or paid advertising business models) or from the professional area, who use the products as a part of their own business.
Standardisation bodies
Although it is not properly included in the value chain of the public information reuse (and therefore excluded from the graph), standardisation bodies can play a key role in the economic impact of this sector. Note that a quick normalisation could make easier for infomediary companies to develop global new products and services. Equally, the adoption of open standards could reduce interoperability costs.
Information reuse, both public and private sector has been practiced for decades, but it has been the rapid popularization of electronic access to information what is allowing the industry to move from a niche to a sector whose economic impact should be treated on its own.
The described value chain shows all agents and tools necessary to develop policies in terms of reusability of data. However, there are a number of additional factors, among which standardization standards, software tools, which could be considered as well as with relevance are included