A research paper aiming to determine which standards for civic data are “best” to open up government data.
In many ways, a precondition to realizing the promise of open government data is the standardization of that data. Open data standards ensure interoperability, establish benchmarks in assessing whether governments achieve their goals in publishing open data, can better ensure accuracy of the data. Interoperability enables the use of off-the shelf software and can ease third party development of products that serves multiple locales. Our project aims to determine which standards for civic data are "best" to open up government data. We began by disambiguating the multiple meanings of what constitutes a data standard by creating a standards stack. The empirical research started by identifying twelve “high value” open datasets for which we found 22 data standards. A qualitative systematic review of the gray literature and standards documentation generated 18 evaluation metrics, which we grouped into four categories. We evaluated the metrics with civic data standards. Our goal is to identify and characterize types of standards and provide a systematic way to assess their quality.
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