Geospatial Open Data Usage and Metadata Quality

• Main Authors: Alfonso Quarati, Monica De Martino, Sergio Rosim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-01-01
• Series: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
• Subjects: geospatial open data; datasets usage; metadata quality
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/10/1/30

The Open Government Data portals (OGD), thanks to the presence of thousands of geo-referenced datasets, containing spatial information are of extreme interest for any analysis or process relating to the territory. For this to happen, users must be enabled to access these datasets and reuse them. An element often considered as hindering the full dissemination of OGD data is the quality of their metadata. Starting from an experimental investigation conducted on over 160,000 geospatial datasets belonging to six national and international OGD portals, this work has as its first objective to provide an overview of the usage of these portals measured in terms of datasets views and downloads. Furthermore, to assess the possible influence of the quality of the metadata on the use of geospatial datasets, an assessment of the metadata for each dataset was carried out, and the correlation between these two variables was measured. The results obtained showed a significant underutilization of geospatial datasets and a generally poor quality of their metadata. In addition, a weak correlation was found between the use and quality of the metadata, not such as to assert with certainty that the latter is a determining factor of the former.