Are Swiss Public Organizations Following Good Practice Standards When Publishing Open Data? An Empirical Investigation

Public organizations are among the largest creators and gatherers of data in many countries. To increase the outreach and transparency of governmental actions as well as augment participation of citizens and increase the economic growth, governments all over the world have therefore started to liberate the access to large parts of government data by creating open government data (OGD) portals. Going live in 2016, the Swiss Federal Council has ordered the development of an OGD platform (opendata.swiss) with the intention among others things to increase the economic growth. But in order that companies might be able to use and see some value in OGD for their data-driven services, the published datasets must be comprehensible, complete, consistent, and machine-readable. With this paper, we investigate if public organizations in Switzerland follow good practice standards when publishing OGD. We conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis on the basis of metadata of published data resources and develop a compliance index that helps to determine the adherence to common OGD practices