With the rise of the open data movement, government and public agencies start to open up their data for the public use. The technical tool for implementing this infrastructure are repositories. Repositories facilitate the collection, publishing and distribution of data in a centralized and possibly standardize way. Metadata is used to catalog and organize the provided data. The operationality and interoperability depends on the metadata quality.
Quantifying the metadata quality can help to measure the efficiency of a repository and discover low-quality metadata records which prevent the user from finding what he/she is looking for. For this a wide range of metrics from the field of metadata quality assessment are researched and implemented. Current approaches should be adopted to the specifics of open government data repositories but also new approaches should be explored to fit the requirements.
In order to show the feasibility of these metrics a platform is implemented which demonstrates the automatic quality assessment of different repositories. A harvester component is used to gather metadata from different repositories using different formats. Open government data will be the focus of this work, the platform, however, is generalized for all kinds of metadata. The results will be evaluated by analyzing their practical use, but also the metrics will be validated with different approaches.
The implementation progress can be watched on GitHub: