A New Approach for Assessing Metadata Completeness in Open Data Portals

Citizens and developers are gaining full access to public data sources through open data portals (ODPs). These datasets allow the creation of applications for helping citizens in different ways, allowing them to actively participate in government processes such as decision-making and policymaking. However, researchers have identified several drawbacks regarding the data they provide. One of the recurring problems cited in literature is related to the metadata associated with each dataset, which may lead to inadequate descriptions or classifications of datasets, affecting open data usability. As completeness is an important metadata quality metric, in this work, the authors propose an approach based on the alignment of metadata schemes to assess the degree of metadata completeness associated to datasets available in ODPs. To evaluate the proposed approach, they conducted two case studies, leading them to observe that the larger the number of metadata schemes, the lower the completeness of the datasets, although not linear.