An evaluation of U.S. municipal open data portals: A user interaction framework

Abstract

As an increasing number of open government data (OGD) portals are created, an evaluation method is needed to assess these portals. In this study, we drew from the existing principles and evaluation methods to develop a User Interaction Framework, with concrete criteria in five dimensions: Access, Trust, Understand, Engage‐integrate, and Participate. The framework was then used to evaluate the current OGD sites created and maintained by 34 U.S. municipal government agencies. The results show that, overall, portals perform well in terms of providing access, but not so well in helping users understand and engage with data. These findings indicate room for improvement in multiple areas and suggest potential roles for information professionals as data mediators. The study also reveals that portals using the Socrata platform performed better, regarding user access, trust, engagement, and participation. However, the variability among portals indicates that some portals should improve their platforms to achieve greater user engagement and participation. In addition, city governments need to develop clear plans about what data should be available and how to make them available to their public.

U.S. state and state capital open government data (OGD): A content examination and heuristic evaluation of data processing capabilities of OGD sites

“…We subsequently added and modified those categories based on the actual data categories present on the homepage of the OGD sites in our study sample. For example, Zhu and Freeman () had a category labeled “Finance;” based on our data, we changed that label to “Finance and Budget.” For the data browsing categories, there were a total of 39 categories, ranging from “Health,” “Recreation,” “Housing,” “Economy,” “Arts, Culture, History,” “Natural Resources,” “Community,” “Education,” to “Quality of Life.” The categories for visualization display, the subcategories were “Table View,” “Chart View,” “Line View,” “Map View,” “Raw Data,” “Text,” “Calendar,” “Form,” and “List.” Meanwhile, there were 24 categories under data extraction formats, including “CSV,” “XLSX/XLS,” “PDF,” “PNG,” “Shapefile,” “JSON,” “RDF,” “RSS,” and “XML.”…”

“…The present study recognizes that there is a gap for using usability principles to evaluate OGD from the perspective of the non-expert citizen. In addition, the majority of the evaluations of OGD sites were on city OGDs (e.g, Kassen, 2013;Throsby et al, 2016;Zhu & Freeman, 2018), including those outside the US (Gill & Corbett, 2017;Vetro et al, 2016). Within the US, there have not been any studies focused on the state OGDs, even though there was a study on Chinese city as well as province OGDs by Wang et al (2018).…”

“…Several recent studies, however, have evaluated OGD platforms directly in terms of their usability. Zhu and Freeman () developed a “User Interaction Framework” that includes dimensions of Access, Trust, Understand, Engage‐Integrate, and Participate, and applied it to the evaluation of 34 municipal OGD sites in the US. Meanwhile, Gill and Corbett () employed usability heuristics to evaluate municipal OGD sites in British Columbia and also used the Open Data Barometer to monitor data quality dimensions with implications for usability.…”

A Research Agenda on Open Data Impact Process for Open Innovation

“…In this sense, we find several topics of interest that could be new research areas, such as the features that an open data portal should have to publish information that is useful for innovation, and for publishing the data in a homogeneous format to enable comparisons between portals. Taking this a step further, it's interesting to note the aspect mentioned by Zhu and Freeman [95] In the third phase -Reused data -the major challenge is to implicitly identify the products, services, and businesses that are created from the reuse of open data. Although the existing literature analyzes the reuse of open data, researchers have difficulty identifying and collecting information about applications developed from open data, and about the businesses that can be created.…”

Understanding Connections: Examining Digital Library and Institutional Repository Use Overlap

“…Zhu and Freemen employed content analysis theory to develop what they termed "a user interaction framework," [2] (p. 1) to analyze how users engaged Open Government Data Portals (OGD). The user interaction framework necessitated the following components: This framework examined the above capabilities in reference to a single digital collection, and the UNT Digital Library had these access features for all collections and individual digital objects.…”