Verifying Open Data Portals Completeness in Compliance to a Grounding Framework

Abstract

Open Government Data Portals (OGDPs) are a way of keeping up the information about government’s actions, including how the collected taxes are used in favor of its citizens. However, one difficult in some of these portals is guaranteeing accountability on OGDP completeness according to different instruments specifying legal requirements and good practices, especially when they may reinforce some requirements or may be even contradictory. This problem leads to the need for a comprehensive methodology to assess completeness of OGDPs related to data and information availability. This work presents a process for constructing a reference guide, aiming to help analyzing completeness of an OGDP content, in compliance to legal requirements and good practices, presented by textual instruments. We conducted an experimental analysis for evaluating the completeness of Transparency OGDPs (TOGDPs) requirements using our process. We evaluated, as (T)OGDP experts, the constructed reference guide on three different TOGDPs. We also used the output guide to interview managers and users of the Niterói TOGDP, in order to both evaluate the quality of the guide and the Niterói TOGDP completeness. We could observe which items of our guide were well understood and which need to be improved. These results are of interest to the OGD research community as they provide a tool for constructing a reference guide that facilitates the systematic assessment of OGDPs completeness, in compliance to a given legal framework. Future research includes testing our approach on different contexts for various OGDP types and exploring automation possibilities.