Open Data Quality Evaluation: A Comparative Analysis of Open Data in Latvia
This work addresses data quality evaluation for stakeholders using open data in business decision-making, but it is incremental as it applies an existing approach to new data.
The research tackled the problem of assessing open data quality by applying a specific approach to Latvian open data sets, revealing differences in quality based on data supplier and common issues across European countries.
Nowadays open data is entering the mainstream - it is free available for every stakeholder and is often used in business decision-making. It is important to be sure data is trustable and error-free as its quality problems can lead to huge losses. The research discusses how (open) data quality could be assessed. It also covers main points which should be considered developing a data quality management solution. One specific approach is applied to several Latvian open data sets. The research provides a step-by-step open data sets analysis guide and summarizes its results. It is also shown there could exist differences in data quality depending on data supplier (centralized and decentralized data releases) and, unfortunately, trustable data supplier cannot guarantee data quality problems absence. There are also underlined common data quality problems detected not only in Latvian open data but also in open data of 3 European countries.