Hydrographic Datasets in Open Government Data Portals: Mitigation of Reusability Issues Through Provenance Documentation

Abstract

The paper provides a quantitative and qualitative snapshot on hydrographic datasets currently published in Open Government Data (OGD) portals aiming at investigating their reusability according to W3C recommendations and FAIR principles. Highly reputed OGD portals have been considered and searched for hydrographic datasets and their metadata. The resulting datasets have been analysed according to their compliance with reusability principles. In particular, we considered three metrics: data format machine readability; licence availability and openness; metadata provenance provision. The analysis highlights that OGD portals still have to solve some issues, in particular, a lack of detailed provenance. To promote the provision of provenance metadata of hydrographic datasets, enabling their comprehension and reuse, we illustrated a practice to improve their reusability by supplying workflow provenance metadata according to W3C PROV recommendation. We provide an illustrative example by documenting and publishing the generation of flooding areas maps produced by the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE).