Open Data Portal Quality Comparison using AHP

Abstract

During recent years, more and more Open Data becomes available and used as part of the Open Data movement. However, there are reported issues with the quality of the metadata in data portals and the data itself. This is a serious risk that could disrupt the Open Data project, as well as e-government initiatives since the data quality needs to be managed to guarantee the reliability of e-government to the public. First quality assessment frameworks emerge to evaluate the quality for a given dataset or portal along various dimensions (e.g., information completeness). Nonetheless, a common problem with such frameworks is to provide meaningful ranking mechanisms that are able to integrate several quality dimensions and user preferences (e.g., a portal provider is likely to have different quality preferences than a portal consumer). To address this multi-criteria decision making problem, our research work applies AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), which compares 146 active Open Data portals across 44 countries, powered by the CKAN software.