TAGIFY: LLM-powered Tagging Interface for Improved Data Findability on OGD portals

Efforts directed towards promoting Open Government Data (OGD) have gained significant traction across various governmental tiers since the mid-2000s. As more datasets are published on OGD portals, finding specific data becomes harder, leading to information overload and so-called “dark data”. Complete and accurate documentation of datasets, including association of proper tags with datasets is key to improving dataset findability and accessibility. Analysis conducted on the Estonian Open Data Portal revealed that 11% datasets have no associated tags, while 26% had only one tag assigned to them, which underscores challenges in data findability and accessibility within the portal, which, according to the recent Open Data Maturity Report, is considered trendsetter. The aim of this study is to propose an automated solution to tagging datasets to improve data findability on OGD portals. This paper presents TAGIFY – a prototype of tagging interface that employs large language models (LLM) such as GPT-3.5turbo and GPT-4 to automate dataset tagging, generating tags for datasets in English and Estonian, thereby augmenting metadata preparation by data publishers and improving data findability on OGD portals by data users. The developed solution was evaluated by users and their feedback was collected to define an agenda for future prototype improvements.