Technical Assessment of Open Data Platforms for National Statistical Organisations
The term quot;open dataquot; is generally understood to be data that are made available to the public free of charge, without registration or restrictive licenses, for any purpose whatsoever (including commercial purposes), in electronic, machine-r...
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| Format: | Other Public Sector Study |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2015
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/10/20451797/technical-assessment-open-data-platforms-national-statistical-organisations http://hdl.handle.net/10986/21111 |
| Summary: | The term quot;open dataquot; is
generally understood to be data that are made available to
the public free of charge, without registration or
restrictive licenses, for any purpose whatsoever (including
commercial purposes), in electronic, machine-readable
formats that ensure data are easy to find, download and use.
National Statistics Offices (NSOs) have the potential to
play a pivotal role in the implementation of open data
initiatives. As producers and curators of data, the
objective of making high quality data more accessible and
usable is consistent with their guiding principles. NSOs
indicate, in research conducted in support of this report,
that one of the difficulties they encounter is that the
technology they use to publish - or electronically
distribute - data for public use is not compatible with open
formats. They also indicate that common software packages
used for open data portals do not accommodate the data
formats and metadata they produce. Two key concerns related
to data dissemination products are addresses: (1) Can such
products designed primarily for NSOs satisfy requirements
for an open data initiative?; and (2) Can such products
designed primarily for open data satisfy the requirements of
NSOs? Furthermore, data reuse, both by data experts and the
public at large, is key to creating new opportunities and
benefits from government data. The following
recommendations are made to improve the overall utility of
data publication platforms to NSOs and the open data
community: improve technical documentation; ensure public
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and endpoints are
interoperable; presentation of metadata and Uniform Resource
Identifiers (URIs) must conform to W3C standards; natural
language search and metadata faceting should be standard;
structural metadata and hypercube support are core NSO
requirements; dashboards and visualisations are necessary
for user engagement; and develop data engagement tools for
improving data-quality and reuse. |
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