Quality of Metadata in Open Data Portals

Abstract

During the last decade, numerous governmental, educational or cultural institutions have launched Open Data initiatives that have facilitated the access to large volumes of datasets on the web. The main way to disseminate this availability of data has been the deployment of Open Data catalogs exposing metadata of these datasets, which are easily indexed by web search engines. Open Source platforms have facilitated enormously the labor of institutions involved in Open Data initiatives, making the setup of Open Data portals almost a trivial task. However, few approaches have analyzed how precisely metadata describes the associated datasets. Taking into account the existing approaches for analyzing the quality of metadata in the Open Data context and other related domains, this work contributes to the state of the art by extending an ISO 19157 based method for checking the quality of geographic metadata to the context of Open Data metadata. Focusing on metadata models compliant with the Data Catalog Vocabulary proposed by W3C, the proposed extended method has been applied for the evaluation of the Open Data catalog of the Spanish Government. The results have been also compared with those obtained by the Metadata Quality Assessment methodology proposed at the European Data Portal.

The Problem of Reference Rot in Spatial Metadata Catalogues

“…This helps to establish a solid expectation about the outcome of the distribution URI and the way they are intended to be accessed. However, even using the model of DCAT, publishers still apply their own practices ignoring the guidelines [35]. We consider the effort worthwhile as it would dramatically increase the resources' accessibility while facilitating Reference Rot verification.…”

“…Nogueras-Iso et al [35] conducted a study similar to this one in which they analyzed the general purpose (non-spatial) Open Data Portal of the Spanish Government, with 22,406 records and 112,874 distributions. In this study, they performed a naive detection of broken links and a basic comparison of declared and obtained data types, based only on the file extensions of the resources.…”

What do data portals do? Tracing the politics of online devices for making data public

“…Data portal metadata has been widely used as the basis for reports on the effectiveness of data portals and open data initiatives. Some researchers assess metadata quality (Neumaier et al, 2016; Nogueras-Iso et al, 2021). provides metadata quality pages including ratings of “findability,” “accessibility,” “interoperability,” “reusability” and “contextuality,” building on elements of the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) standard 31 .…”

Metadata Standards: a Review Towards Modeling Experiments

“…Metadata is utilized in various areas and subfields of science [Formenton et al 2018]. An example is the use of metadata in Open Data initiatives for the publication of large volumes of data [Nogueras-Iso et al 2021]. Metadata is efficiently utilized when organized into Metadata Standards [Hayslett 2023].…”