Evaluation of German open data portals

In the last years, many cities and states in Germany built up portals where they publish data, for instance about how they spend money, to an overview of the trees in their city. This Open government data is becoming more and more important. First, transparency of public institutions is always important and second, data-driven services might be able to use this data in a great way.

In this publication we evaluated how well the open data portals of the largest German cities and states are doing with the focus on educational data. Our findings are:

  • most portals already use open licences
  • but many portals do not use machine-readable formats like csv, they rather rely on PDF
  • Not all portals use metadata standards
  • Many cities do not share the projects being created with their data
  • There is not one portal which is best in all categories
  • Many cities do not have open data portals yet

We presented this at ISI 2021, you can find the article at https://doi.org/10.5283/epub.44955.