Assessment and visualization of metadata quality for government data

An increasing number of datasets from government, public organizations and institutions are published as open data. Metadata that describes them, are cataloged at central places to enable a better access to these datasets. Quantifying the metadata quality can help to measure the efficiency of a catalog and discover low-quality metadata records which prevent the user from finding what she is looking for. We researched and implemented a range of metrics from the field of metadata quality assessment as part of an open data platform. This paper describes the platform that automatically assesses the quality of different open government data portals using the CKAN catalog software. The results are aggregated and visualized through a web application in order to establish a continuous and sustainable monitoring service.