Government open data portals: A measurement of data veracity coverage

Abstract

Open data initiative has been adopted by many countries worldwide due to the need for establishing agile open government and knowledge-based economy. As a result, we can witness an increasing amount of government open data shared on public government's portals that become sources of rich big data. While this scenario provides data transparency and eases accessibility for public data consumers, the quality aspect, or the veracity property (as commonly coined to big data) of open data is the topic of concerned. Not only poor quality data causes misleading results, the reputation of the government as an open data provider can also be negatively affected. Thus, to understand how the government's portals deal with the veracity aspect of their data, in this paper, we present the results of examining quality criteria imposed by selected government's data portals for their data contributors. In particular, we extract quality criteria from the open data policy of the government's data portals under study. The result shows that out of 108 portals, only 27% of the portals explicitly state their quality criteria in the policy, with varying coverage of quality criteria. The frequency of the identified 15 quality criteria shows the types of quality criteria that receive more (and less) attention by the open data portals based on their relative importance. We conclude with suggestions on the areas of further research and development in the government's open data.