Measuring Data Demand Within the Public Sector


Discussion Paper for data.europa.eu: “What are the needs of open data re-users from public sector institutions in Europe? This question is critical to facilitate the publication of open data and support to re-users from EU institutions and public authorities in Member States in line with their needs for policymaking, service provision and organisational management. To what extent is this question asked in open data policymaking across Europe? And how?

This discussion paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of existing approaches and indicators in the European open data landscape to assess public institutions’ needs as data re-users. This overview serves as a basis to drive a discussion with public sector stakeholders on suitable methods and indicators to measure public institutions’ data demand to foster demand-driven data publication and support on data.europa.eu, the official portal for European data.

The undertaken literature review and the analysis of international measurement frameworks show feeble evidence of existing approaches and indicators developed by EU institutions and Member States to assess public institutions’ open data demand. The results of this discussion paper raise the following questions to be discussed with stakeholders to further develop demand-driven data publication and support to public sector re-users.

  1. Why is it important to measure public institutions’ data demand?
  2. What are suitable engagement activities for public sector re-users?
  3. What is needed to evolve demand measurement from an occasional to a structural
    activity?
  4. How can automated metrics be leveraged to measure the data demand by public
    institutions?
  5. To what extent can existing international indicators be re-used and complemented to
    measure public institutions’ data demand?
  6. How can data providers in EU institutions and Member States be supported in adopting a
    demand-driven approach towards the publication of open data for public sector purposes?…(More)”.