Big Data Quality: a Roadmap for Open Data

Paper by Paolo Ciancarini, Francesco Poggi and Daniel Russo: “Open Data (OD) is one of the most discussed issue of Big Data which raised the joint interest of public institutions, citizens and private companies since 2009. In addition to transparency in public administrations, another key objective of these initiatives is to allow the development of innovative services for solving real world problems, creating value in some positive and constructive way. However, the massive amount of freely available data has not yet brought the expected effects: as of today, there is no application that has exploited the potential provided by large and distributed information sources in a non-trivial way, nor any service has substantially changed for the better the lives of people. The era of a new generation applications based on open data is far to come. In this context, we observe that OD quality is one of the major threats to achieving the goals of the OD movement. The starting point of this study is the quality of the OD released by the five Constitutional offices of Italy. W3C standards about OD are widely known accepted in Italy by the Italian Digital Agency (AgID). According to the most recent Italian Laws the Public Administration may release OD according to the AgID standards. Our exploratory study aims to assess the quality of such releases and the real implementations of OD. The outcome suggests the need of a drastic improvement in OD quality. Finally we highlight some key quality principles for OD, and propose a roadmap for further research….(more)”