(m)App my data! Developing a Map-ability Rating and App to Rapidly Communicate Data Quality and Interoperability Potential of Open Data

Abstract

Abstract. In an age of burgeoning open data sources, ranging from authoritative platforms to crowd-sourced contributions, the need for data integration is paramount - only with integrated, combined, data can today’s complex problems be addressed. However, assessing the quality of data and its potential for integration/interoperability is complex. FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and re-useable) approaches go some way to help, but most repositories still only offer text-based search results and require the user to download the data and assess its quality and fitness-for-purpose manually. This paper examines whether exploiting geospatial approaches - specifically, understanding whether a dataset can be mapped and hence integrated with other datasets - could address these issues, in particular for non-expert users. We explore challenges related to open data for education and environmental sustainability and introduce a novel, visual map-ability rating to assist data users in rapidly understanding the data quality and interoperability potential of data they wish to use. This rating system has been developed by researchers from outside the location science domain, to better reflect what is important to the wider community, and derives from a review of 104 open datasets. As well as providing useful insight to data users, the ratings can be used to guide data publishers as to how to improve their data offering.