Is Open Data Ready for Use by Enterprises? Learnings from Corporate Registers

摘要

Open data initiatives have long focused on motivating governmental bodies to open up their data. The number of open datasets is growing steadily, but their adoption is still lagging behind. An increasing number of studies assess open data portals and open data quality to shed light on open data's current state. Since prior research addressed neither datasets' content, nor whether it met enterprises' data needs, our study aims to address this gap by investigating the extent to which open data is ready for use in the enterprise context. We focus on open corporate registers as an important segment of open government data with high relevance for enterprises. Our findings confirm that open datasets are heterogeneous in terms of access, licensing, and content, which makes them difficult to use in a business context. Our content analysis reveals that less than 50% of analyzed registers provide companies' full legal addresses, while only 10% note their contact information. We conclude that open data in corporate registers has limited use to its lack of required attributes and relevant business concepts for typical use cases.