Publication of ‘Assessment of the value of data and other types of assets in data.europa.eu’
Focusing on methods to understand the presence of data.europa.eu content in external sources and its value in data
The recent publication by data.europa.eu, ‘Assessment of the value of data and other types of assets in data.europa.eu’, is the first in a series of reports focused on the value of data, metadata and other resources available on the data.europa.eu portal. The report presents methods to examine the presence of data.europa.eu content in other digital platforms, tools and applications and recommends related datasets and resources.
The analysis builds upon previous research on the concepts, methods and architectures to make (open) data more sustainable. This shifted the focus of data portals from simply being seen as a means for data publishing and discovery to sources of added-value content and resources that facilitate data-reuse and foster data communities.
To gain greater insight into the value of the data.europa.eu portal, this publication focuses on methods that allow for a better understanding of the presence of data.europa.eu assets in external sources such as GitHub or Reddit, that are commonly used by software developers. The objective is to provide reproducible methods that can be used to gather comparable data in the future.
The outcomes of the analysis show that the presence of data.europa.eu content in user communities is limited. To increase uptake, the authors recommend reinforcing messages for these communities. For example, by providing a code that can be used with a specific dataset along with an associated data story. Furthermore, they conclude that the data obtained from the APIs of these sites is, in most cases, insufficient to understand the behaviour of users and the creation of data communities.
Future reports will further explore user behaviour through ad-hoc literature reviews and user surveys. Moreover, they will combine data from external sources with data acquired from web analytics techniques and other indicators to analyse the quality of data and resources of data.europa.eu.
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