problem

Many government open data initiatives such as datos.gob in Spain present usability problems when users and developers want to interpret and reuse the data from their open data portals. Because of these problems, they tend to become “data graveyards”.

When the site stores a large amount of unnecessary & ill-formatted data which is not removed or changed, data homogeneity is affected and these sets become non-compliant with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) digital asset principles. This usually makes navigation hard and discourages users from coming back.

goals

We want to encourage the creation of usable open data, validating and cleaning it up, provided by open data sources (mainly datos.gob, but other sources could be added in the future or it may be user definable).

Our second objective is to present this validated data in an easy-to-use way for developers to use, and an easy-to-read way for studying and examining by hand, as well as providing a validation summary that explains how the data was analyzed and where its quality score comes from.

solution

We provide a web application to generate a validation summary of the data set chosen by the user (following these guidelines). The report shows an overall quality score, as well as a summary about the problems observed as well as detailed information and their specific location.

The results are presented in an intuitive way directly in the web interface, and the user has the option to download the report as a PDF document.

SDGs

One of the aims of the project is to impact some of the Sustainable Development Goals on the United Nations’ 2030 schedule.

We focus on goal 8 (economic growth), helping by achieving higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, developing technologies on high-value added sectors like Open Data.

Additionally, we are also focused on goal 9 (industry innovation and infrastructure), upgrading infrastructure and retrofitting industries to make them sustainable, with increased efficiency on resource usage and greater adoption of clean and environmentally sound technologies and industrial processes.