A rationale for data governance as an approach to tackle recurrent drawbacks in open data portals


Conference paper by Juan Ribeiro Reis et al: “Citizens and developers are gaining broad access to public data sources, made available in open data portals. These machine-readable datasets enable the creation of applications that help the population in several ways, giving them the opportunity to actively participate in governance processes, such as decision taking and policy-making.

While the number of open data portals grows over the years, researchers have been able to identify recurrent problems with the data they provide, such as lack of data standards, difficulty in data access and poor understandability. Such issues make difficult the effective use of data. Several works in literature propose different approaches to mitigate these issues, based on novel or well-known data management techniques.

However, there is a lack of general frameworks for tackling these problems. On the other hand, data governance has been applied in large companies to manage data problems, ensuring that data meets business needs and become organizational assets. In this paper, firstly, we highlight the main drawbacks pointed out in literature for government open data portals. Eventually, we bring around how data governance can tackle much of the issues identified…(More)”.