An Approach for Metadata Enrichment on Open Data Portals

Open data initiatives have resulted in a large amount of data being published on open data portals. In order to make published data more accessible these portals provide search mechanisms based on metadata like category, tags, format, and publisher. However, due to the lack of metadata information, like category values, search results are incomplete, and data is harder to be found. Therefore, this paper presents an approach for metadata enrichment on open data portals. In particular, the presented approach is focused on suggesting categories one dataset should belong to, based on the combination of tags that is used for its description. This approach relies on the tags usage for describing datasets within categories and the Formal Concept Analysis method for creating a hierarchical order of tags within categories. The presented proposal has been evaluated using data from Ireland's open data portal.