Preserving the Benefits of Open Government Data by Measuring and Improving Their Quality: An Empirical Study

Context: Open Government Data (OGD) represent an invaluable resource for enabling active citizenship. A significant example is represented by the mandatory data that Italian public administrations (PAs) are required to publish concerning their contracts. Nevertheless, a low quality of data provided by PAs could hamper the prospect of citizen involvement. Goal: Our objective is to define a set of basic metrics for public contracts OGD on the basis of the ISO SQuaRE standards family, with the goal of enabling the automated evaluation of dataset quality. Method: We started with the metrics defined in the ISO 25024 standard and adapted them to the data schema of the OGD under evaluation. We assessed the results by looking at the issues revealed by the metrics applied to the data released by a pool of PAs. Results: We were able to define a set of metrics, and apply them to to the datasets released by 12 distinct organizations. The metrics allowed us to identify several quality issues that limit the reuse of OGD from the citizen perspective. Conclusions: The metrics we develop are able to identify quality issues and are suitable to perform an initial automated assessment of OGD datasets. This exercise also support the generality of the ISO 25024 quality measures.