Towards Cleaning-up Open Data Portals: A Metadata Reconciliation Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a metadata reconciliation approach to improve tag quality and interlinking in Open Data Portals, addressing issues like synonyms and ambiguity to enhance data reuse.

Contribution

It proposes a novel combined local and global tag reconciliation method for open data portals, improving metadata quality and portal interconnectivity.

Findings

Effective reduction of tag inconsistencies

Enhanced inter-portal data linking

Improved data reuse potential

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for metadata reconciliation, curation and linking for Open Governamental Data Portals (ODPs). ODPs have been lately the standard solution for governments willing to put their public data available for the society. Portal managers use several types of metadata to organize the datasets, one of the most important ones being the tags. However, the tagging process is subject to many problems, such as synonyms, ambiguity or incoherence, among others. As our empiric analysis of ODPs shows, these issues are currently prevalent in most ODPs and effectively hinders the reuse of Open Data. In order to address these problems, we develop and implement an approach for tag reconciliation in Open Data Portals, encompassing local actions related to individual portals, and global actions for adding a semantic metadata layer above individual portals. The local part aims to enhance the quality of tags in a single portal, and the global part is meant to interlink ODPs by establishing relations between tags.