Meloda 5: A metric to assess open data reusability

Abstract

An updated metric developed to assess the degree of open data reusability, called MEtric for the evaLuation of Open DAta: Meloda 5 is presented. Previous version of the metric, Meloda 4, had six dimensions: the legal licensing of data, the mechanisms to access the data, the technical standards of the datasets, the data model, the geographic content of the data and the updating frequency. With all these dimensions, the metric provides a quantitative evaluation about how reusable the datasets released are. During the last five years, this metric has been cited and used by some other authors but the extensive use of the metric has brought to light some of its limitations. In order to get deeper insights into the topic, a panel of international experts has been surveyed about two aspects of the metric. First aspect was what other factors should be considered in order to qualify the reusability of a released dataset. And the second aspect was the internal structure, the levels for every dimension of the metric; if they should be increased, merged, removed or divided. Considering the results of the survey, first, we identify the factors / dimensions that should be kept: legal licensing, access to information, technical standard, standardization, geolocation content and updating frequency of data. Second, we consider the inclusion of two new dimensions: dissemination and reputation. Then, we present the new internal structure, the levels for each dimension, and the measures to evaluate the degree of reuse of each dataset. Finally, a standardization of the metric for other steps of the data impact process, data reuse analytics and data-driven services generation are presented together with future research lines.

Open data-set identifier for open innovation and knowledge management

“…In other words, reuse typically involves the use of a data-set by someone other than its creator (Pasquetto et al , 2017, 2019). For open data in general, open data reuse refers to the use of data for a purpose other than what was intended by the original producer (Abella et al , 2014; 2019b). According to Abella et al (2014), for open data to be reused, four minimum conditions must be met: absence of technical barriers to reuse; possibility of automated access to the information; existence of a legal framework that allows its use; and access to knowledge of the structure of the published information.…”

“…This is the aspect that we are going to develop in the next sections, building on the insight of Steinberg and Brehm (2009, p. 63) who state that “the more we know about a source, in this case, about open data, the better we can reuse it”. In that line, there are some initiatives such as the MELODA metric, which was established in 2011, as a reaction to the lack of consistency in the data-sets published in open data portals, to analyse the degree of open data reuse (Abella et al , 2014; 2019b). At present, there is still no system that enables the unique identification of open data-sets and allows direct and automated access to them.…”

“…To present some examples of the OpenDatId identifier, the Reusing Open Data in Spain III report (Abella et al , 2022b) has been used as a reference. This report identifies 289 valid portals, lists 58.318 available data-sets and samples 300 data-sets, of which 280 (93.3%) are valid one.…”

“…This report identifies 289 valid portals, lists 58.318 available data-sets and samples 300 data-sets, of which 280 (93.3%) are valid one. To analyse their degree of reuse, the authors applied MELODA version 5, identifying the following dimensions for each data-set (Abella et al , 2019b): legal licence for reuse, technical standard in which the information is presented, mechanisms of access to the information, the data model used, geographic content of the information, update frequency, dissemination and reputation. Taking this information as a starting point, 20 data-sets from the most popular Data Management Systems – comprehensive knowledge archive network (CKAN), ODS, Socrata, Arcgis Open data and open-source data management platform (DKAN) – have been selected from different portals that were federated in the datos.gob portal – https://datos.gob.es/es- (Table 3).…”

COVID-19 open source data sets: a comprehensive survey

“…The credibility of reviewed work is supported by the open source data sets and code accompanying the pre-prints. The research works can be compared on the re-usability metric of the data sets such as Meloda 5 [104,105].…”