Defining a master data management approach for increasing open data understandability

Abstract

Reusing open data is an opportunity for eSociety to create value through the development of novel data-intensive IT services and products. However, reusing open data is hampered by lack of data understandability. Actually, accessing open data requires additional information (i.e., metadata) that describes its content in order to make it understandable: if open data is misinterpreted ambiguities and misunderstandings will discourage eSociety for reusing it. In addition, services and products created by using incomprehensible open data may not generate enough confidence in potential users, thus becoming unsuccessful. Unfortunately, in order to improve the comprehensibility of the data, current proposals focus on creating metadata when open data is being published, thus overlooking metadata coming from data sources. In order to overcome this gap, our research proposes a framework to consider data sources metadata within a Master Data Management approach in order to improve understandability of the corresponding (shortly published) open data.