Quality of Metadata in Open Data Portals

Abstract

During the last decade, numerous governmental, educational or cultural institutions have launched Open Data initiatives that have facilitated the access to large volumes of datasets on the web. The main way to disseminate this availability of data has been the deployment of Open Data catalogs exposing metadata of these datasets, which are easily indexed by web search engines. Open Source platforms have facilitated enormously the labor of institutions involved in Open Data initiatives, making the setup of Open Data portals almost a trivial task. However, few approaches have analyzed how precisely metadata describes the associated datasets. Taking into account the existing approaches for analyzing the quality of metadata in the Open Data context and other related domains, this work contributes to the state of the art by extending an ISO 19157 based method for checking the quality of geographic metadata to the context of Open Data metadata. Focusing on metadata models compliant with the Data Catalog Vocabulary proposed by W3C, the proposed extended method has been applied for the evaluation of the Open Data catalog of the Spanish Government. The results have been also compared with those obtained by the Metadata Quality Assessment methodology proposed at the European Data Portal.