A Rubric-Driven Evaluation of Open Data Portals and Their Data in Transportation
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ORIGINAL PAPER
A Rubric‑Driven Evaluation of Open Data Portals and Their Data in Transportation Archana Venkatachalapathy1 · Anuj Sharma1 · Skylar Knickerbocker2 · Neal Hawkins2 Received: 4 July 2020 / Revised: 31 August 2020 / Accepted: 2 September 2020 / Published online: 14 September 2020 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract The open data movement has been gaining momentum in the Transportation industry in recent years, with multiple State Departments of Transportation (DOT) launching their own repository of datasets. These actions offer the potential to improve both transportation safety and mobility. That said, an examination of the quality of data, ease of use, and availability of metadata across agencies revealed a significant variation among them and presented a serious concern to realizing the full potential of these principled efforts. This study highlights the imminent need for agency support towards assessing data warehouse quality and in establishing an index to measure performance. The approach includes a data portal evaluation rubric (DPER) that captures the essence of the National Open Data Policy. Its metrics are devised from practices implemented across several agencies to ensure the effective use of open data. The proposed DPER was applied to 43 transportation-related open data portals at the state (39) and national level (4). The DPER examines the quality, the openness of data, and the relevance of published content to the Transportation industry. The evaluation found that the portal hosted by the state of New York scored the highest due to its user-friendly interface with interactive visualization tools, relevant data content, detailed information about the data, and the useful API (Application Program Interface) references for application developers. The absolute scramble by agencies to fight the life-impacting events of 2020 emphasizes both the need and urgency to provide standardized, accessible, and accurate data for a ubiquitous audience. Keywords Open data · Rubric · Variability · Big data
Introduction Information is core to transportation research and innovation of which data are essential. Agencies are not only gaining maturity in terms of data processing capabilities but are also experiencing a depth in data sourcing. For example, agencies have typically been the only source for operations data, * Archana Venkatachalapathy [email protected] Anuj Sharma [email protected] Skylar Knickerbocker [email protected] Neal Hawkins [email protected] 1
Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50014, USA
Institute for Transportation, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50014, USA
2
such as vehicle speeds. However, today, there are varieties of markets delivering speed data captured from smartphones and telematics systems in commercial fleets. Those agencies choosing to mature their data-based decision capabilities are realizing the value in terms of both choice intelligence and collaborative crisis management, lik
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