Open data index

Overview

The open data methodology is an evaluation which examines the coverage and openness of a country's open data portal. It evaluates an open data portal from 11 different aspects based on the open definition of open data.

Scoring standard

According to the methodology used by OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), they evaluates the openness of an open dataset according to the following questions:

Does the data exist? (5 marks)

OECD specifically indicates that the data of an open data portal should be directly comes from the official government department or a third party with the permission of the government that they can fully represent the government. And if so, the third party should explicitly states the permission.

Is data in digital form? (5 marks)

This question does not examines if the data can be accessed online or by public but if the data exists in any digital format.

Publicly available? (5 marks)

A data could be considered as publicly available when it can be accessed without any permission or password by every individual (not just government officers) and there is no restrictions for the amount of photocopies can be made if the data is in the paper form. For this question, it does not matter if the data is in paper form or digital form.

Is the data available for free? (15 marks)

The data is available for free if the access of the data does not require any forms of charges.

Is the data available online? (5 marks)

The data is available online if it can be accessed through the Internet from an official source.

Is the data machine-readable? (15 marks)

This question addresses whether the data is in a form that can be easily processed by the computer. File types such as XLS, CSV, JSON, XML are considered as machine-readable, while PDF, or HTML are not.

Available in bulk? (10 marks)

If the whole dataset can be easily downloaded, it can be considered as available in bulk.

Openly licensed? (30 marks)

This question addresses whether the data can be freely used, reused, and redistributed by everyone without any restrictions. A list of types of licenses that meet the requirements is listed at http://opendefinition.org/licenses/.

Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? (10 marks)

This question examines if the data is updated on a regular basis. It requires personal judgement with rationale.

Each of these questions evaluates different aspects of a dataset, and each question is weighted differently based on the importance. There is in total 13 types of datasets. The final score is calculated according to following equation: sum of all datasets scores/1300 ( (the maximum possible score that a country can get) - sum (13 dataset)/1300 = index percentage. The OECD ranks each country according to their percentage of openness.

In addition, the Open Data Barometer adds two more question for their evaluation of the open data portal, and they are:

Reference

http://index.okfn.org/methodology/

http://opendatabarometer.org/2ndEdition/about/method.html

http://opendefinition.org/od/2.1/en/

open standards and the digital age

See Also

• Open data
• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development