Evaluating the Quality of Open Data Portals on the National Level

Renata Máchová,Martin Lnenicka

doi:10.4067/s0718-18762017000100003

Abstract

Over the last few years, governments worldwide have started to develop and implement open data initiatives to enable the release of government data in open and reusable formats without restriction or charge for their use by society. As a result, a large number of open data repositories, catalogues and portals have been emerging in the world. The efficient development of open data portals makes it necessary to evaluate their quality systematic, in order to understand them better and assess the various types of value they generate. Citizens also expect data disclosed by official authorities to have quality in the sense that they are official data and therefore should be accurate and reliable. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to examine and compare the quality of these portals. For this purpose, a benchmarking framework is proposed and validated to evaluate the quality of open data portals on the national level. The results obtained show that the number of datasets online and the sophistication of open data portals and their functions differ, reflecting the lack of harmonization and the need for quality standards. In particular, the United Kingdom, India and the United States have published many datasets and launched advanced portals.

Highlights

The world economy has become a data-centric one and as a result, those with capabilities to extract maximum benefits from their data will have the power at political, social, cultural and, especially, economic level [5]
It consists of four distinct stages: 1. Identification of Open Government Data (OGD) sources as open data portals on the national level as were defined in [30] and ranks represented by the Global Open Data Index (GODI) [40] and the Open Data Barometer (ODB) Global Report and index [52]; 2
The comparison is based on the rankings of the GODI and the ODB index from 2015, which evaluate the state of open data in selected countries in the world

Summary

Introduction

The world economy has become a data-centric one and as a result, those with capabilities to extract maximum benefits from their data will have the power at political, social, cultural and, especially, economic level [5]. Over the last few years, an increasing number of governments have started to open up their data This so-called Open government movement has resulted in the launch of numerous open data portals and infrastructures that aim at providing a single point of access for government data and explore their impacts [24], [30], [53], [58]. By publishing these data on open data portals, the governments are giving it back to the citizens, which indirectly paid for their creation with their taxes in the first place [25]. This change could be helpful to gain the benefits from opening up further data silos in the public sector [55]

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Conclusion