Implementation of Metadata Quality Metrics and Application on Public Government Data

Abstract

Public government data refers to documents and proceedings which are freely available and accessible. Repositories facilitate the collection, publishing and distribution of data in a centralized and possibly standardized way. Metadata is used to catalog and organize the provided data. The operationality and interoperability depends on the metadata quality. In order to measure the efficiency of a repository the metadata quality needs to be quantified. Quality assessment is considered to be most reliable when carried out by a human expert. This approach, however, is not always feasible. Hence, an automatic assessment of the quality of metadata should be pursued. Proposed metrics from the field of metadata quality assessment are taken, implemented and applied to three public government data repositories, namely GovData.de (Germany), data.gov.uk (United Kingdom) and publicdata.eu (Europe). Five quality metrics were applied: completeness, weighted completeness, accuracy, richness of information and accessibility. The metrics and their implementation will be discussed in detail and the results evaluated.