Timeliness of Open Data in Open Government Data Portals Through Pandemic-related Data: a long data way from the publisher to the user

Abstract

The paper addresses the “timeliness” of data in open government data (OGD) portals. It is one of the primary principles of open data, which is considered to be a success factor, while at the same time it is one of the biggest barriers that can disrupt users trust in data and even the desire to use the entire open data portal. However, assessing this aspect is a very difficult task that, in most cases, becomes an impossible for open data users. There is therefore a lack of comparative studies on the timeliness of data of different national open data portals. Unfortunately, 2020 gave the opportunity to find out this. It became easy enough to compare how long is the data path from the data holder to the OGD portal by analysing the timeliness of Covid-19-related data sets in relation to the first case observed in a country. The study thus fills the gap of comparative studies by addressing 60 countries and their OGD portals concerning the timeliness of the data, providing a report on how much and what countries provide the open data as quickly as possible. It makes it possible to understand how quickly OGD portals react to emergencies by opening and updating data for their further potential reuse, which is essential in the digital data-driven world.