Open Knowledge International, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes openness and transparency, has decided to update the survey for its Global Open Data Index. This index measures Open Data publication in 122 countries.
The organisation said on its blog that in updating the survey, it wanted to “improve the clarity of the questions and provide better guidance to submitters in order to ensure that contributors understand what datasets they should be evaluating and what they should be looking for in those datasets”.
“Furthermore, we hope the updated survey will help us to highlight some of the tangible challenges to data publication and reuse by paying closer attention to the contents of datasets”, it said.
Enhancing our understanding of the data we measure
The proposed changes are intended to achieve the following objectives:
- Better measure and document how easy it is to find government data online;
- Enhance our understanding of the data we measure; and
- Improve the robustness of our analysis.
Some questions listed in the survey evolved to improve the clarity of the index, OKI said. Questions added include: “Does the data exist”, “Is the data in digital form” or “Is the data machine-readable”.
The proposed new survey (still in draft format) is open to feedback. The new survey structure will be applied to the next Global Open Data Index and Local Open Data Index, which lists published Open Data at local level in the countries analysed.
Feedback and comments can be added through a dedicated forum.