Dados abertos governamentais na prática: desafios na sua descoberta, acesso e uso

Abstract

Context: The implementation of government open data is increasingly frequent due to society’s demand for transparency in public management. The literature has shown that there are several techniques available to assess the quality of open government data. Problem: Assessing the quality of open government data is not trivial, particularly when performed manually, which is why may affect the effectiveness of the assessment. Among the challenges of this activity, we can mention, among others, the effort to identify the metadata to support the evaluation. Motivation: Effective assessment of the quality of open government data enables the identification of improvement opportunities, supports the selection of repositories that meet to minimum quality requirements and, consequently, favors the discovery, access and use of these data types. Goal: To analyze the quality of data published in Brazilian government portals, for the purpose of identifying limitations and errors with respect to discovery, access and use data, from the point of view of researchers and users, in the context of social programs and transparency in personnel expenses. Research Question: Does the government open data framework implemented by specific portals made available by the Brazilian government meet the requirements of the data quality dimensions? Methodology: An exploratory study was carried out in two parts. The first part manually evaluated the data from the Student Financing Fund repository of the Higher Education (FIES) in relation to the degree of alignment with the quality dimensions of data. From the first part of the exploratory study, a solution was proposed semi-automated to support data and metadata evaluation and subsequent selection of government open data. The second part of the exploratory study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Results: The metadata of the repositories of open data (FIES, Minha Casa Minha Vida and Transparency Portal). The amount of resources evaluated was 107 in the first, 7 in the second and 357 in the third, respectively represent 22.72%, 1.49% and 75.80%. The total amount of resources evaluated was 471, or ie 100% of the resources. The analysis results show that in the first repository only invalid metadata (url, format and description) were found. while in second repository found only the invalid metadata (description) and in the third Invalid metadata (format, created, name and description) was found. In addition Furthermore, resources were found where the url identified in the ’url’ metadata cannot be accessed for validation and found the metadata (format, description, created and name) without the proper completion, that is, non-conformities with the quality dimensions. Note the effectiveness of the proposed solution for evaluating the data and metadata from government open data portals. Expected Contributions: Support the identification and addressing of opportunities for improvement of the analyzed national open government data portals. Access and use of the solution implemented in the context of this dissertation to support the assessment of metadata quality, and, by extension, also support the identification of excellent repositories. The latter can serve as a reference for other repositories that need to evolve and, therefore, improve alignment with data quality dimensions.