Quality Assessment and Evolution of Open Data Portals

Abstract

Despite the enthusiasm caused by the availability of a steadily increasing amount of openly available, structured data, first critical voices appear addressing the emerging issue of low quality in the meta data and data source of Open Data portals which is a serious risk that could disrupt the Open Data project. However, there exist no comprehensive reports about the actual quality of Open Data portals. In this work, we present our efforts to monitor and assess the quality of 82 active Open Data portals, powered by organisations across 35 different countries. We discuss our quality metrics and report comprehensive findings by analysing the data and the evolution of the portals since September 2014. Our results include findings about a steady growth of information, a high heterogeneity across the portals for various aspects and also insights on openness, contact ability and the availability of meta data.