Open data portals. Methodology of analysis and application to Spanish municipalities

Abstract

Public administrations publish open data for later reuse by citizens. Besides the obvious impact on transparency, they have an important economic potential which explains the increasing adoption of this type of initiatives. There is an increasing number of administrations that decide to create open data portals, a tendency that municipalities have followed. Few empirical papers have assessed this type of portals and the analyses have been mainly qualitative or limited to a reduced number of portals, so there are no generally accepted criteria for the assessment of their implementation. The main contribution of this paper is the definition of a method to analyse open data portals and its application to a sample of municipalities of Spain, a country at the forefront of data re-utilization in Europe. Furthermore, the economic-financial information available in these portals is analysed, as it is essential to accountability, fight corruption and evaluate the financial sustainability and effectiveness of public service delivery. Results show that there is much room for improvement in this field. Only 40% of the cities analysed have an open data portal, and the average score of the sample analysed does not reach 50%. Most portals seem to work as mere data repositories, neglecting those aspects that promote data use by the non-expert public, accountability, citizen engagement and the quality of the data being disclosed (e.g., definition of the metadata used). So, the paper concludes with some recommendations for improvement.