An Analysis of Interaction Between Users and Open Government Data Portals in Data Acquisition Process

The paper addresses the "timeliness" of data in open government data (OGD) portals. It is one of the primary principles of open data, which is considered to be a success factor, while at the same time it is one of the biggest barriers that can disrupt users trust in data and even the desire to use the entire open data portal. However, assessing this aspect is a very difficult task that, in most cases, becomes an impossible for open data users. There is therefore a lack of comparative studies on the timeliness of data of different national open data portals. Unfortunately, 2020 gave the opportunity to find out this. It became easy enough to compare how long is the data path from the data holder to the OGD portal by analysing the timeliness of Covid-19-related data sets in relation to the first case observed in a country. The study thus fills the gap of comparative studies by addressing 60 countries and their OGD portals concerning the timeliness of the data, providing a report on how much and what countries provide the open data as quickly as possible. It makes it possible to understand how quickly OGD portals react to emergencies by opening and updating data for their further potential reuse, which is essential in the digital data-driven world.

PurposeThe study seeks to investigate the quality of metadata associated with the open government data (OGD) portals of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) constituents – Bahrain (BH), Kuwait (KW), Oman (OM), Qatar (QA), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and United Arab Emirates (UAE).Design/methodology/approachA quantitative framework, supported by extant literature, is adopted to assess the metadata quality of the six OGD portals of the GCC constituents.FindingsAmong the six GCC countries, QA has the most advanced OGD metadata quality followed by KSA, UAE, OM, BH and KW. Furthermore, the OGD metadata quality (MQ) of UAE and OM stand at the same pedestal whereas BH and KW OGD portals are lagging behind.Originality/valueWhile the OGD quality has been investigated in extant literature, the MQ of the OGD portals for the GCC countries has not been investigated so far – the present study seeks to plug this gap.

Purpose Open Government Data (OGD) portals aim to enhance accountability and transparency by serving as central access points for all government data at local, regional and national levels. To enhance user engagement with OGD portals, it is essential to optimize feedback mechanisms within these portals. This work aims to analyse the current status of feedback mechanisms as a foundation for their future improvement to strengthen user engagement and to advance in accountability and transparency. Design/methodology/approach This research conceptualizes feedback mechanisms in OGD portals, followed by case studies and extrapolation through the analysis to a wider range of OGD portals by means of an automated detection of input channels, output channels and the connecting flows. Findings The study reveals significant variability in the structure and formality of input and output feedback channels. Feedback mechanisms range from highly informal channels, such as social media, to formal structured channels, such as dedicated feedback forms. Our data analysis identifies three distinct clusters of countries based on the characteristics of feedback mechanisms in their OGD portals. Originality/value While existing research highlights the importance of feedback in OGD portals, it mainly focuses on the flow from users to data publishers through input channels. The novelty of this work lies in examining not only input channels but also the return flow from data publishers to users through output channels.

Open government data initiatives have been widely adopted by governments at all levels, offering the potential to transform interactions between governments and the public. Public value creation is one of the most significant opportunities associated with open government data (OGD) for various stakeholders, including public sector agencies, private businesses, academia, citizens, and civic organisations. However, OGD has little inherent value; it’s worth emerges through effective use. Therefore, supporting the use of OGD is considered key to delivering public value to individuals and communities.Indeed, making an effective impact with OGD requires users to activate its value. Through the use of OGD by governments, the public can be more involved in and collaborate on public service delivery and policymaking. Hence, OGD can serve as a supporting tool to enhance government performance and achieve public value<i>. </i>Despite emerging research on public value creation through OGD portal use, there is still a lack of theoretical frameworks to explain the factors affecting public value creation through OGD portal use by government employees in the public sector. Therefore, a comprehensive systematic literature review was undertaken to identify the factors influencing public value creation by governments using OGD in the public sector. A research model was developed based on the Delone and McLean (2003) IS success model, in combination with Moore’s (1995<i>) </i>public value theory. This study employed a sequential exploratory mixed methods approach, beginning with a quantitative phase followed by a qualitative phase to explain the quantitative findings. A structural equation modelling tool (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the online survey results, while NVivo software was used to analyse the findings from the semi-structured interviews. The model was validated in the Australian public sector.Meta-inference analysis of the survey and interview findings supports the validity of the research model and identifies the factors that significantly influence public value creation through the use of OGD in the Australian public sector. The findings reveal that employees’ use of the OGD portal and their satisfaction significantly affect the public value of OGD, while portal quality, open data quality, and service support have indirect effects. Furthermore, moderator analysis suggests that awareness of the value of OGD among public sector employees critically influences the delivery of public value.The proposed theoretical framework can be used to assess the factors affecting OGD public value creation by users in the public sector. This research contributes to the body of knowledge in the OGD domain from a public sector employee perspective and offers insights for researchers, developers, and policymakers to improve the use of OGD in the public sector.This study has practical implications for governments and policymakers regarding the importance of effective OGD use among employees in creating public value. Specifically, the results of this study strongly suggest that promoting OGD portal use, which leads to increased user satisfaction and, ultimately, delivers public value. OGD portal developers and government agencies responsible for providing open data must collaborate to better support portal users and address their needs and expectations. Additionally, it’s recommended that governments prioritize raising awareness of OGD, enhancing portal usability, and providing training programs for public sector employees. Future research can enrich the investigation of public value creation of OGD in other contexts and countries.

Insufficient support services are one of the barriers for citizen’s open government data (OGD) utilisation. Considering the strengths and effectiveness of virtual assistants (VAs) in providing instant and user-friendly support services, this study focuses primarily on its implementation for OGD portals. A conversational VA prototype is specifically developed. A between-subjects experiment with one factor (VA/text-based support services) was carried out. Results show citizens’ positive attitudes towards VAs providing support services on OGD portals. No significant difference was found for citizens’ acceptance, trustworthiness and rapport for OGD portals with and without a VA. Accuracy rate of completing tasks with VAs is slightly higher. A correlation lies between trustworthiness and rapport with OGD portals. This study benefits the improvement of OGD portals’ online services to enhance citizens’ experiences and provides a research model both for investigating VAs’ effects and for comparing different designs of a same kind of service for an interface.

Public value creation is one of the most important opportunities of open government data (OGD) for different stakeholders including public sector agencies, private businesses, academia, citizens, and civic organizations. However, OGD has hardly any value on its own, yet the value is created by its use, hence supporting OGD portal use is a key point to delivering public value. Indeed, making an effective impact on OGD requires users to activate its value. Therefore, this study aims to propose a model to explore factors that hinder or facilitate public value creation using OGD from the public sector employee perspective. Using the DeLone and McLean (2003) model as a theoretical basis with the combination of the Moore (1995) framework, the study model was validated in the Australian public sector, using partial least square structural equation modelling. The results of this study support the validity of the research model and discover the factors that have a significant influence on public value creation through the use of OGD in the Australian public sector. Findings reveal that employee's OGD portal use and their satisfaction significantly predict the public value of OGD, while the OGD portal quality, open data quality and service support indirectly affect the public value of OGD. Furthermore, the moderator analysis suggests that awareness of the value of OGD among public sector employees has a critical effect on the delivery of public value. The proposed theoretical framework can be used to assess the factors affecting OGD public value creation by users in the public sector, which can help researchers and developers to improve and update their system, based on the results.

In the following paper, we describe results from mining citations, mentions, and links to open government data (OGD) in peer-reviewed literature. We inductively develop a method for categorizing how OGD are used by different research communities, and provide descriptive statistics about the publication years, publication outlets, and OGD sources. Our results demonstrate that, 1. The use of OGD in research is steadily increasing from 2009 to 2016; 2. Researchers use OGD from 96 different open government data portals, with data.gov.uk and data.gov being the most frequent sources; and, 3.Contrary to previous findings, we provide evidence suggesting that OGD from developing nations, notably India and Kenya, are being frequently used to fuel scientific discoveries. The findings of this paper contribute to ongoing research agendas aimed at tracking the impact of open government data initiatives, and provides an initial description of how open government data are valuable to diverse scientific research communities.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present an evaluation of the national Open Government Data (OGD) portal of India (www.data.gov.in) and underline the significance of maintaining the quality of the data sets published online.Design/methodology/approachThe research approach bases itself on the adapted version of embeddedness theory and cybernetic model apart from the data sets–usability framework proposed in recent literature (Machova et al., 2018).FindingsFindings from this study indicate that OGD initiative needs to be embedded in the social fabric of the country to ensure that the data sets are being reused by a myriad set of stakeholders for deriving social and economic value. Likewise, the linkages between the stakeholders (for instance, government, citizens, non-governmental bodies, private sector, etc.) should be fortified to enable the reuse of the data sets in an appropriate manner.Originality/valueMaintenance of quality of the data sets holds paramount importance. Implicitly, efforts should be made on the part of all the stakeholders concerned that the data sets be qualitatively and quantitatively adequate. This paper concludes with limitations and further research pointers.

The usage of Open Government Data (OGD) can enable the government transparency for better governance, increase citizen collaboration, and promote innovation through public service improvement. OGD initiatives involve different stakeholders and complex publishing guidelines. In general, governments initiate OGD in their countries and provide the government-run portals to support the provision and consumption process of OGD. Insufficient usage of OGD and limited provision by the government is a great challenge to OGD development. Monitoring the operation and constantly analyzing the usage can be beneficial for OGD policymakers to gain insight into usage, to plan, and to enact the law to support the OGD initiative. This study proposes a Business Intelligence (BI) framework to analyze OGD portal datasets and its usage. The data from Thailand's OGD (ThOGD) portal was derived to validate our framework. The work focuses on designing and implementing the BI framework. We demonstrated the features of the prototyped BI system in supporting the analysis through various data visualization.

The open government data (OGD) movement claims to contribute to transparency and increased citizen understanding of government action. However, the literature so far shows these goals are not being reached, as ‘common’ (non-expert) citizens fail to access and understand OGD. This research makes an empirical contribution to this debate through a design experiment in the form of a field lab with a governmental agency, data visualization experts, and non-expert citizens in the Netherlands. In this field lab, the current practice of disseminating OGD by a regional water authority on the issue of drought was redesigned based on non-expert citizens’ needs. Our findings show that non-expert citizens prefer data storytelling techniques over OGD portals or traditional OGD visualizations such as graphs or dashboards. This is informative for the current shift from OGD geared at expert users, to OGD geared at fostering effective transparency with non-expert users. We also build on existing research to develop new evaluation criteria for OGD visualizations, and find that completeness and usability seem more important than objectivity in disseminating OGD with non-expert citizens when communicating about complex policy problems.

Open Government Data (OGD) is being published by various public administration organizations around the globe. Within the metadata of OGD data catalogs, the publishing organizations (1) are not uniquely and unambiguously identifiable and, even worse, (2) change over time, by public administration units being merged or restructured. In order to enable fine-grained analyzes or searches on Open Government Data on the level of publishing organizations, linking those from OGD portals to publicly available knowledge graphs (KGs) such as Wikidata and DBpedia seems like an obvious solution. Still, as we show in this position paper, organization linking faces significant challenges, both in terms of available (portal) metadata and KGs in terms of data quality and completeness. We herein specifically highlight five main challenges, namely regarding (1) temporal changes in organizations and in the portal metadata, (2) lack of a base ontology for describing organizational structures and changes in public knowledge graphs, (3) metadata and KG data quality, (4) multilinguality, and (5) disambiguating public sector organizations. Based on available OGD portal metadata from the Open Data Portal Watch, we provide an in-depth analysis of these issues, make suggestions for concrete starting points on how to tackle them along with a call to the community to jointly work on these open challenges.KeywordsOpen dataDataset evolutionEntity linkingKnowledge graphsKnowledge graph evolution

Recently, many governments have developed open government data portals as a way to facilitate the finding and the access to datasets produced by their agencies. The development of these portals has facilitated the retrieval of this kind of data, but they still have significant limitations. One drawback of current portals concerns the resolution of queries with spatial constraints. Many portals solve spatial queries selecting the datasets that contain in their description the place name informed by the user, which can lead to queries with low recall and precision. Aiming to solve these limitations, we propose a new spatial search engine to improve information retrieval in open government data portals. The main contributions of this work are the development of a system that retrieves OGD at the level of resources and the proposition of a ranking metric that evaluates the relevance of each resource retrieved from a query. We validated the proposed search engine using real data provided by the Brazilian open government data portal. The results obtained from the initial experiments showed that our solution is viable as it can retrieve data with good accuracy for many spatial queries of different granularities.

Open Government Data initiatives and particularly Open Government Data portals have proliferated since the late 2000's. A comprehensive analysis of the capabilities and potential of these initiatives is currently missing from the recent research literature. In order to address this gap, the paper at hand aims towards analyzing the landscape of Open Governmental Data in the European Union from a functional, semantic and technical perspective. Our research focused on the collection and categorization of an indicative number of public data sources for each of the 27 European Union country-members through investigating their services and characteristics. By modeling and classifying the data sources according to their key attributes, we were able to proceed to their statistical analysis and assessment in terms of their content, licensing, multilingual support, acquisition, ease of access, provision and data format. Our results portray the current quality of Public Sector Information infrastructures and highlight what still needs to be done in order to make public data truly open and readily available for researchers, citizens, companies and innovation in general.

Governments and researchers traditionally focus on the publication of Open Government Data (OGD), whereas the actual use of the data is often neglected. Open data initiatives are often criticized for not realising the promoted benefits, yet only the use of OGD can result in these benefits. OGD use requires several actors, activities and tools; however, these are fragmented and depending on each other. The OGD infrastructure presented in this dissertation aims to enhance the coordination of OGD use. Core components are an advanced and interoperable three-tier metadata model to find, analyse, visualise, interact about and assess OGD, interaction mechanisms to stimulate interaction between OGD users, OGD providers and governmental policy makers, and data quality indicators to assess the data’s fitness for use. This study is among the first to describe the design of an OGD infrastructure. This dissertation contributes to science by providing a comprehensive overview of barriers and functional requirements for OGD use from the perspective of the OGD user, by defining functional building blocks for the design of the OGD infrastructure, and by developing and evaluating a prototype of the OGD infrastructure. Furthermore, this study is the first to apply coordination theory in the field of OGD and shows that coordination of OGD use does not merely require a focus on processes, but additionally requires a technical perspective including the integration of tools, a social perspective including interaction between involved actors, and the interaction between the social and technical perspective. Moreover, while OGD infrastructures traditionally mainly provide discovery metadata, this study confirms several recent studies that different types of metadata (discovery, contextual and detailed metadata) need to be combined to improve OGD use. Finally, whereas kernel theories concerning coordination, metadata, interaction and data quality are often studied separately, this study reveals that it is essential for the development of OGD infrastructures to combine these four kernel theories.

A data category recommendation framework for Thailand’s open government data portal (ThOGD) is proposed to assist data providers when publishing and registering a new dataset into the portal’s data catalog. However, existing approaches such as a multi-label classification problem, have not adopted the semantic features of data categories sufficiently. Deep learning model for Natural Language Processing has recently demonstrated to achieve high potential in learning the different degrees of semantic feature abstraction because all layers of multi-head attention blocks are provided with different fragments of metadata descriptions and corresponding tags. To obtain a robust recommendation result, this paper proposes DataCat: a Category Recommendation Framework using the attention-based framework through the ThOGD portal. Within this framework, the integrated multi-layers with particular semantic information are directly attached to the output layer of a network to enhance the effectiveness of information retrieval. The results point out that the attention-based framework has a weighted effect on loss of optimization. The performance when looking at the macro average of precision and F1-score improves by 0.664% and 0.557%, respectively. The micro average of those improves by 0.806%, and 0.698%, respectively.