Abstract
The Open Government Data portals (OGD), thanks to the presence of thousands of geo-referenced datasets, containing spatial information are of extreme interest for any analysis or process relating to the territory. For this to happen, users must be enabled to access these datasets and reuse them. An element often considered as hindering the full dissemination of OGD data is the quality of their metadata. Starting from an experimental investigation conducted on over 160,000 geospatial datasets belonging to six national and international OGD portals, this work has as its first objective to provide an overview of the usage of these portals measured in terms of datasets views and downloads. Furthermore, to assess the possible influence of the quality of the metadata on the use of geospatial datasets, an assessment of the metadata for each dataset was carried out, and the correlation between these two variables was measured. The results obtained showed a significant underutilization of geospatial datasets and a generally poor quality of their metadata. In addition, a weak correlation was found between the use and quality of the metadata, not such as to assert with certainty that the latter is a determining factor of the former.
Highlights
The Open Data (OD) movement is playing an important role in the geospatial sector, by introducing a paradigm shift in the supply and use of geodata that is provided for free, in a machine-readable format and with minimal restrictions on reuse [1,2]
The first two quartiles show that almost 50% of their datasets are barely viewed, and another 25% just more visited. This fact is unexpected in the case of the US considering the size of its population, as well as of its portal that has grown to over 200,000 datasets provided by hundreds of data sources, and its fullblown tradition of attention to OD, which quickly turned it into an open data government flagship initiative and set an example for other government data catalogues that have been open worldwide since 2009
The extremely low values for Humanitarian Data Exchange portal (HDX) can be explained by the fact that its number of published datasets doubled in about nine months, as we noticed comparing the values collected in late March 2019, in our previous work [10], to the one available at the end of December 2019
Summary
The Open Data (OD) movement is playing an important role in the geospatial sector, by introducing a paradigm shift in the supply and use of geodata that is provided for free, in a machine-readable format and with minimal restrictions on reuse [1,2]. Thousands of OD datasets have been released on the web by governments and public institutions through Open Government Data (OGD) portals at national and international levels (e.g., data.gov.uk, data.gov, and europeandataportal.eu). These portals aim to provide accurate, consistent, and authoritative resources for generating “added value” both economic and social [3,4]. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10, 30 government data as open represents a significant change to the user who can access data typically provided for free with minimal restrictions on reuse [8,23]. Coetze et al [1] provide an outlook about how, in the last few decades, the geospatial domain has increasingly adopted OD, the significant advances in this regard, and how openness has changed how geospatial data are collected, processed, analyzed, and visualized
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