Evaluating Civic Open Data Standards

Abstract

Abstract:In many ways, a precondition to realizing the promise of open government data is the standardization of that data. Open data standards ensure interoperability, establish benchmarks in assessing whether governments achieve their goals in publishing open data, can better ensure accuracy of the data. Interoperability enables the use of off-the shelf software and can ease third party development of products that serves multiple locales. Our project aims to determine which standards for civic data are "best" to open up government data. We began by disambiguating the multiple meanings of what constitutes a data standard by creating a standards stack. The empirical research started by identifying twelve "high value" open datasets for which we found 22 data standards. A qualitative systematic review of the gray literature and standards documentation generated 18 evaluation metrics, which we grouped into four categories. We evaluated the metrics with civic data standards. Our goal is to identify and characterize types of standards and provide a systematic way to assess their quality.

Digital technologies in local agri-food systems: Opportunities for a more interoperable digital farmgate sector

“…While this proposal might sound radical, it is already adopted in public governing bodies and called for by digital advocacy organizations. Open standards are often seen within governments and public bodies, where efficient interdepartment communication is required (Sieber and Bloom, 2018) (Solid Project, 2022). The need for alternative data governance standards has emerged as a hot-button issue in wake of continued misuse of user data from large platforms (e.g., Cambridge Analytica Scandal, see Confessore, 2018).…”

Electronic Markets on AI and standardization

“…Only in the past editorial on platform culture researchers have ascertained that the same message may be interpreted differently depending on the social and cultural context (Alt, 2022b). The need for multiple standards has led to the terms "e-business stack" (Janner et al, 2008), "standard BPM stack" (Hündling & Weske, 2003) or "standards stack" (Sieber & Bloom, 2018) to denote an aligned set of standards. Such stacks may also be industry-specific (e.g., for the healthcare sector, see de Mello et al, 2022) or emerge for complex scenarios (e.g., for smart cities, see Lai et al, 2020).…”