The Impact of Impediments on Open Government Data Use: Insights from Users

Open Government Data (OGD) is interoperable data that is published on the Internet by public organizations and can be freely used and redistributed by users. OGD is expected to result in several benefits, such as innovative products and services, collective problem solving, and equal access to information. However, several impediments complicate the realization of the benefits. These impediments can impact the process of using OGD that consists of the four phases: motivation, search and evaluate, access and prepare, and aggregate and transform. In this paper, we examine the case of a data science project conducted by master's students to understand how impediments impact their use. In order to study this case, we use a mixed-method approach combining a questionnaire sent to the 30 students and nine in-depth interviews. The analysis of the data allowed us to identify and discuss the impact of several impediments on use, such as difficulties in finding an idea and the lack of longitudinal data. Subsequently, we were able to give recommendations to publishers to improve their OGD portals, infrastructure, and data as well as opening up research directions in the OGD field.