Investigating Metadata Adoptions for Open Government Data Portals in US Cities

摘要

Open government data (OGD) is a valuable resource for both policy transparency and government accountability. All levels of the United States government are working hard to promote open data and its portals. However, there is still a lack of studies on local-level OGD portals in the United States, particularly on the quality of metadata adopted by these portals. By examining 200 US cities, a list of 112 local-level portals is sampled and we investigate the current usages of open data platforms for building local-level OGD portals. This study further investigates and discusses the adoption and potential issues of metadata on those OGD portals. Our result findings discuss the platform distributions among US local-level OGD portals, and also highlight several critical issues associated with metadata on the portals. We anticipate the results will inspire further studies on identifying solutions to improve the metadata and enhance the usability of open government data portals.