Criteria for Open Data Portals Offer Best Practices for Websites

摘要

"Open Data," which is any publicly available information, has become increasingly popular since the 1990s. It has been especially relevant with President Obama's emphasis on the importance of open data for "transparency, participation, and collaboration". Open data is providing new opportunities for statisticians to engage across science and policy. Kristanne Littlefield, Chief Digital Officer for Arlington County in Virginia, recently created an open data portal and asked students in the Data Science for the Public Good Program (DSPG) at the Social and Decision Analytics Laboratory (SDAL), a part of the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, for feedback. The DSPG team consulted a variety of open data portals, tech websites, and journal articles about effective website design and use to create a comprehensive of a set of criteria extendable to all open data portals. These criteria suggest a number of best practices for user interface and data structure, which any locality creating and maintaining an open data portal should consider. The criteria are divided into two broad categories with the subcategories listed in parentheses: 1. User Interface (organization, navigation, and design) 2. Data (tidiness, accessibility, documentation, and visualization) Both categories are evaluated on the basis of accessibility to a broad audience, and applicability to a wide range of uses, including statistical analysis.