Improving the speed and ease of open data use through metadata, interaction mechanisms, and quality indicators

The use of Open Government Data (OGD) has not kept pace with the expectations as existing OGD infrastructures mainly serve as data repositories. Many OGD infrastructures do not stimulate or support OGD use processes, and there is a lack of research regarding which functionalities can stimulate such processes. The objective of this study is to use a design science approach to evaluate whether metadata, interaction mechanisms, and data quality indicators can improve OGD use. OGD use comprises five main activities, namely searching for and finding OGD, OGD analysis, visualizing OGD, interacting about OGD, and OGD quality analysis. We expect that three OGD key infrastructure elements—metadata, interaction mechanisms, and data quality indicators—allow for improving these five OGD use activities. A prototype of an advanced OGD infrastructure was created, which implements the three OGD infrastructure elements. Three quasi-experiments with a pretest posttest control group design were conducted. The quasi-experiments showed that the prototype facilitated the usability of the novel OGD use functionalities. Our quasi-experiments supported our propositions that metadata, interaction mechanisms, and data quality indicators contribute to making OGD use easier and faster, and enhance the user experience. The infrastructure elements improved OGD use by better enabling searching, analyzing, visualizing, discussing, giving feedback on, and assessing the quality of open data. Hence, we plea for integrating metadata, interaction mechanisms, and data quality indicators in open data infrastructures to advance open data usage.