comparison research on open government data websites in china

Comparison Research on Open Government Data Websites in

China——Base on the Investigation of Nine OGDWebsitesAuthor: Liu HuiyunSchool of Information Management, Sun Yat-sen University, No.132, East Outer RingRoad, Higher Mega Center of Guangzhou, P. R. China .Email: [email protected]

ABSTRACT[Purpose/Significance] As the big data era is approaching, governments of differentcountries that have abundant public information are beginning to evolve frominformation disclosure model to open data. China has also placed value on the opendata for public data sharing. Recently, some cities in China have already started tobuild up their own websites to open data for people. In order to understand the currentChinese government’s open data process, this study conducts a survey. [Method/Process] On the basis of introducing the overall situation of opening the governmentdata in China, this study investigates nine government data websites which havealready been built by nine Chinese municipal cities. Aiming to knowing the currentsituation of websites in detail, the study compares these websites in three aspectsconcluding data, metadata and the website. The investigation of the data concludesthe quality, the quantity, the accessibility and the data updating. Besides, the studysurveys the metadata in the respects of the internal attribution,the right, externalattribution and data license. What’s more, the investigation of the website will focuson the four factors: the service, navigation, the service and the retrieval effectiveness.[Result/Conclusion] After compare these websites, the study made the conclusionand provide some advice to build the better Chinese government’s data websites forpublic data sharing in the future.KEYWORDS: government data; open data; comparison; data website

1.IntroductionThe Open Data movement, heir in part to the Open Source and Open Access

movements, encourages the free publication of data from different domains underlicenses that favor their reuse. As the most important of the content in the Open Datamovement, Open Government Data (OGD) has been attracting a growing attentionand interest of both researchers and practitioners from various disciplines due to itswidely recognized potential to generate public value through driving innovation andeconomic growth, and also scientific research, and by promoting transparency andsubstantial evidence-based political dialogue. Now open data is still in its infancy.Less than five years after the first major OGD portal went live, hundreds of nationaland local governments have established OGD portals, joined by internationalinstitutions, NGOs and businesses. All are exploring, in different ways, how openingdata can unlock latent value, stimulate innovation and increase transparency andaccountability. In line with the growth of open data, a range of different efforts haveemerged to measure various aspects of open data readiness, implementation,

Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium at the 18th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL 2016), and Asia-Pacific Forum of Information Schools (APIS 2016) December 6th, 2016

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outcomes and impacts. For example, The Open Data Barometer Global Report（2013）provided a snapshot of OGD practices at national level. Covering a broad sample of77 countries (including China), the report combined peer-reviewed expert survey dataand secondary indicators to look at open data readiness, implementation and emergingimpacts and found that many developing countries lack basic foundations such aswell-managed and digitized government datasets. Meanwhile, the report also showedavailability of key open datasets in China is amongst the lowest in the Barometerrankings ( Davies T, Sharif R, Alonso J.,2013) . On May 8th and 9th 2014, The WorldWide Web Foundation and The Governance Lab at NYU convened a two-dayworkshop in New York, bringing together a group of open data assessment experts toexplore the development of common methods and frameworks for the study of opendata. And they present a report towards common methods for assessing open data.In the report，the context (The context within which open data is being provided), thedata (the nature and qualities of open datasets), the use (the context of use of the opendataset) and the impact (the benefits to be gained from using the open dataset) arefour key components of a comprehensive open data assessment framework(DaviesT,2014). With national initiative on “Open Government Data” in China, more andmore cities such as Shanghai、Beijing、Wuhan、Wuxi、Chongqin、Wuxi、Zhanjiang、Qingdao、Taizhou etc. are engaged in the activities of building the Open GovernmentData website. So it is of significance to monitoring and measuring the availability, useand impact of OGD. Currently, many research about the methods for assessing OGDhas appeared (The table 1 summarizes current landscape of open data assessment).


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Table 1 The current landscape of open data assessmentResource from: Towards common methods for assessing open data: workshop report & draftframework

Considering the maturity and integrity of OGD websites in differentcountries, we create the assessment of OGD websites in China in order to measurethe availability and use of OGD websites in China.

2.BackgroundSince the 1950s, governments have agreed that transparency, “the right to

know,” and Open Government Data being verified and used by the generalpopulation can lead to many benefits, such as increased accountability, citizenparticipation and collaboration. More recently, the movement resurfaced with thepossibility of the using Web 2.0 to publish and consume OGD, and many possiblebenefits are broadly advertised, including governmental, scientific, commercialand political domains(W. Parks,1957; J. Little and T. Tompkins,1974; D.Mitchell,1977). The benefits can be the delivery of better public services andincreasing government efficiency and effectiveness; use in scientific


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research(Commission of the European Communities,2009); the generation ofcommercial value and promoting more cooperation between government and thesociety, including a positive impact on the quality and effectiveness of politicaldebate(B. Ubaldi,2013); increased accountability(W. Wong and E.Welch,2004),citizen participation, engagement and collaboration(M. Francoli,2011); and the decrease of corruption. Collectively, there are three main reasonsfor opening government data, including (1)transparency, (2)releasing social andcommercial value and (3)participatory governance(Attard J, Orlandi F, Scerri S, etal.,2015).

Open data only refers to data that is available free of charge for the generalpublic without any limitations(Reiche, K.J., Hofig, E.,2013). Open data isconsidered to be a key enabler of Open Government. Open Government Data isa subset of Open Data, and is simply government-related data that is made open tothe public(Kucera, J., Chlapek, D., Ne ˇ caský, M.,2013). Government data mightcontain multiple datasets, including budget and spending, population, census,geographical, parliament minutes, etc. It also includes data that is indirectlyowned by public administrations (e.g. through subsidiaries or agencies), such asdata related to climate/pollution, public transportation, congestion/traffic, childcare/education(Attard J, Orlandi F, Scerri S, et al.,2015). more and moregovernments are building open government data websites to open public data.Generally, the relationships among open data, open government data and opengovernment data websites can be described in the figure1.

Open Data

Open Gov. Data

Open Gov.Data

websites


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Fig.1 : Relationships among Open data, Open Government Data and Open GovernmentData websites

Because the OGD website is the effective way to open government datapublicly and freely, there are many countries are beginning to build the OGD websites,such as America、England、Japan and China. Several countries have alreadydemonstrated their commitment to opening government data by joining the OpenGovernment Partnership (OGP)( Carroll, J.J., Bizer, C., Hayes, P., Stickler,P.,2005).China also has a national initiative on “Open Government”, but no explicitopen data initiative at the national level, although some activity is taking place in a lotof cities in China. So it is of significance to know and summarize the experience andshortage of these OGD websites. So, in this paper we aim to explore the state of opengovernment data websites in China. For this aim, we conduct a systematic survey onthe OGD websites which have already built their government data websites for thepublic.3.Research methodology

Currently, many research about the methods for assessing OGD has appeared(The table 1 summarizes current landscape of open data assessment). According to theOGD life-cycle which is made up of three sections, namely a pre-processing section

(rectangle), an exploitation section (oval), and a maintenance section(hexagon)( Attard J, Orlandi F, Scerri S, et al.,2015).The OGD website is in theexploitation section and a maintenance section including Data Interlinking, DataDiscovery, Data Exploration, Data Exploitation and Data Curation. After we did thepre－study on Chinese OGD websites, we built the Assessment framework ofChinese OGD websites which consider the characteristics of Chinese OGD websitesin figure2.


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Fig.2 Assessment framework of Chinese OGD websites4.Data collection

According to the landscape of open data assessment summarized in the research,we selected 9 municipal cities in China to carry out the research, including Beijing,Shanghai, Hangzhou, Zhanjiang, Wuhan, Chongqing, Qingdao, Taizhou and Wuxi.We made the selection based on two factors:（1）Governmental domain name.At theprocess of initial selection, we picked out commercial websites grounded on thedomain names, and got a list of 18 websites providing open data service and run byChinese government currently.（2）Administrative level. Through viewing thoseinitially chosen websites, we eliminated some websites unconcerned with open data,and then considering the huge gap between governmental finance and quantitiescaused by inconsistent administration levels, we finally picked the governmental opendata websites from nine municipal cities ( including province-level municipality,sub-provincial level city and prefecture-level city) to conduct this research. Researchtime: 3/11/2016-11/11/2016.5.Result（1）Quantity

In the aspect of data quantity, websites varied greatly. The open data website ofQingdao has the largest quantity of 3454 entries. But most entries are gathered underthe category of permission or sanction, for which its diversity is no better than otherwebsites. Beijing’s governmental data open website contains 310 entries in 17categories, while Shanghai’s has 787 entries in 12 categories. 787 entries, 12categories for Hangzhou, and 1901 entries 13 categories for Wuhan. The 927 entriesin Wuhan’s website are classified into 37 divisions according to the source department.As for Zhanjiang and Taizhou, since the majority of the data focus on macro level,their open data websites have minor entries for 29 and 54 separately.

Fig3.data quantity of Chinese nine ODG websites（2）Accessibility

Research result shows all the 9 websites are open to the public for free currently.In the view of publicity, these websites can be divided into 2 groups: Open withcondition and without condition. Governmental data open websites in Hangzhou,Zhanjiang, Taizhou, Wuxi opened they data to the users with no condition, whileBeijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Chongqing, Qingdao demand the users to sign up or loginin before downloading or checking the data. In the process of registration,


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comparatively detailed personal information is required, such as career, contactinformation, purpose. This, to some degree, does hamper people’s freedom to accessdata resources. Also, Beijing’s website demands the verification of users’ ID numberprovided in registration.

In the aspect of availability, the data open websites in some cities like Beijing,Wuhan, Hangzhou, exist the data-inaccessible phenome currently. Some websites, likeHangzhou, Wuhan and Chongqing, set external links for partial data entries, but theselinks only link to the homepage of other departments or institutions. Users have toseek the Intel they require in the new websites linked, which significantly impairedthe unity and accessibility of data, and increased the time cost of users’.

Speaking of data format, xlsx is the most popular format among all the websitesresearched, almost all governmental data open websites provide xlsx versions to users.Considering the fact that most of the data provided has already be processed, such ascatalogues and name lists, formats like xlsx are already able to satisfy mostnon-scientific-research users. But if we take machine-readability into consideration,only partial data provided in the Websites of Beijing, Qingdao and Wuhan has amachine-readable version; Beijing governmental open data website provide xlsxversion together with txt and csv for most situation; Partial data from Qingdao andWuhan provides xml version. If users want to do data mining to excavate hiddenvalue in government data, the machine-readability still demand further improvement.(3) Data updating

Regarding to the frequency of data updating, Data open websites in Shanghai,Beijing, and Qingdao are more frequent in updating, averagely every 3 to 5 days anew batch of data goes public, and generally their data is more updated. With theaccumulation of data sets, the general data quality of websites will change for thebetter.

Data published on the websites of Chongqing and Taizhou are mostly on themacro level with the updating frequency of year or season. Both websites haveupdated their data to the third season of 2016.

Besides, there are some websites with comparatively low updating frequency,some might even have stopped updating. Data of Zhanjiang stopped updating at theend of 2014. Hangzhou’s newest data was posted at the end of 2015. This indicatingthat both cities have stopped running and maintaining their governmental data openwebsites.(4) Data license

Based on the research on the nine governmental data open websites, not all ofthem made specialized statement to their data using permission. Websites ofZhanjiang, Chongqing, Taizhou and Wuxi give no clear instructions about users’rights. Even though Qingdao and Beijing have made the statements of usingpermission, the rules are extremely strict, even the limitation of reprinting data isincluded.(5) Metadata

All the websites give fairly explicit indexing to the data, especially name, theme,source, time and type which are covered by all websites.


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But some data open websites lack abstract to data content, like Wuxi, Qingdao,Taizhou, Chongqing. However, abstract plays an important role in helping users havea fast learning about the content of data, especially under the circumstance that thetitles of data are sometimes blur.

Only a small group of websites indexes the using permission to data, while mostwebsites give no indication. However even those websites only give indexes like“general use”, “free use”, without further explanation about what it is or how to use.

It is worth mentioning that Qingdao governmental open data website makes verydetailed indexes for the format of each entry of data, which enhances themachine-readability for users. Besides this website provide links to relevant data, andthis helps users find data more efficiently. In the aspect of enrichment of its metadata,Qingdao’s open data website does best.

Fig4.metadata of Chinese ODG websites(6) Data service

The results of research indicates, majority of data open websites haven’t providepersonalized service yet. Only the open data website of Chongqing has apparentpersonalized functions. The current situation shows, there is not much use for thefunctions of personalization, and the effect is also vert limited.

Visualization of data get applied to some of the websites, including Qingdao,Chongqing, Taizhou and Wuxi. Considering the complication of data provided, it canbe hard to visualize. But for websites like Taizhou and Chongqing’s, who providemacro data mostly, data visualization is practical and meaningful. Besides, Qingdaooffer a different way of visualization data by customizing graphics. User can make piecharts directly on pages, through operations similar to Microsoft Excel.(7) Search service

According to research results, all open data websites have simple search, andamong which, there are many websites have realized expert search through subjects,titles and sources. Most websites also support cross-database search, so users can get


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information from other departments.However, considering the search results, the precision ratio and recall ratio is

not ideal. We did the research with the search formula of ‘大学’, finding mostwebsites have no search results. User can only find the relevant content with ‘高校’,even these two words have almost same meaning. Besides, basically most websites donot support the search of data content, which makes it harder for users to retrievemicrocosmic data. And since the cross-database search, search results are mixed withgovernmental news, applications, which greatly influenced the accuracy. Comparedwith search boxes, it is much more efficient to use the catalogues.(8) Interactive and navigational function

All websites searched have provided operators contacts, including mailboxes andtelephone numbers, in convenience for feedbacks. Some websites have speciallymade questionnaires, rating function to help improve service. Qingdao governmentaldata open website additionally contains social media into the website, for theconvenience of data sharing and spreading.

And navigation function of all websites researched is basically enough to contentmost users to retrieve information.6.Discussion

These results are intuitively plausible to show the current state of opengovernment data websites in China. Form the perspective of data, the OGD websitesare still in its initial stage. Generally, the number of data in the OGD websites are notabundant though most of data was been classified orderly. The websites have thecatalog for the user to find the data, but some of these catalogs is blank or can notreached and some of the catalogs are linking to the other websites’resource whichmeans the data are not sufficient for the users.

Additionally, the frequency of updating data in most OGD websites is lowrelatively, and two of them has stopped the updating for one or two years. That meansalthough these governments built the websites to open their public data, they did notreally place the value on the websites and operate the websites.

As one of the most important index to assess the data, the availability of the datain these websites is also not so good. Though all of the websites are open to the publicfreely, but some of them are limited to open data. These websites demand the the userto register on their websites, so that the user is forced to submit their personalinformation included some privacy, such as the real name, the contact information, thejob occupation and even the identification number. Open data needs to be technicallyopen as well as legally open. Specifically, the data needs to be available in bulk in amachine-readable format(OKFN,2012). For the result that the XML becomes all ofthe websites’ first choice which granted that the data can be automatically read andprocessed by a computer. However, the format need to multifarious for users’ differentdemands.

The metadata on the websites is detailed in the generally. But some of themwhich lacking detailed open license still need to clearly stated to define the extent ofdata’s usage.

For the layer of websites, the indexes are composed of the design, the navigation,


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the search result, the service and the interaction. Generally speaking, the quality ofwebsites is not so good, though the design of the web and the navigation is simple andclear and most of them supply kinds of way to contact the operator. The searchfunction is too simple and most of the search result can not meet the user’s needwhich is hard to attract more people to find and use the data. What’s more, there arefew websites provide the personal service for the public which is not helpful toenhance the data’ utilization and give the user’s better experience

Making the communications more social-media friendly is also an importantfactor to access the quality of the website. Some of the websites not only provide thefunction to comment the data on the websites but also provide the function to sharethe data to the social media which means these websites are more friendly.

In generally, the OGD websites we had conducted are in their infancy. There arestill lots of aspects to be developed or improved.7.Conclusion

This paper contributes to conduct the current situation of Chinese OGD websites.Built on relevant OGD literature, the assessment framework of Chinese OGDwebsites were proposed (the data, the metadata and the website). Consider theintegrity of the websites and the characteristics of different administration level, weselected 9 OGD websites from 9 municipal cities in China. After we conduct the data,the metadata and the website, we found that as the effective way to open governmentdata, Chinese OGD websites are still in their infancy and there are many aspects needto be improved ,especially in data accessibility, data license and data service.Regarding future research, there are several limitations of the present approach. Oursample of websites was sufficient to support our findings. However, our results arestrictly generalizable only to the OGD websites of municipal cities. For future work,researchers are encouraged to sample from a different domain to evaluate the state ofChinese OGD. Also we suggest researchers for analyzing the state of the ChineseOGD considering the policies of the government about the OGD. Finally, anotherlimitation is related to the method we used in the research. It is of significance toconduct users’ perception of the OGD websites. Therefore, future research mustincorporate such factor into their models to evaluate Chinese OGD websites.

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[8] W. Wong and E. Welch, “Does E-Government PromoteAccountability? A Comparative Analysis of Website Openness and Government Accountability,”Governance,vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 275–297, 2004.[9] M. Francoli, “What Makes Governments Open JeDEM - eJournal eDemocracy Open Gov., vol.3, no. 2,pp. 152–165, 2011.[10] Attard J, Orlandi F, Scerri S, et al. A systematic review of open government data initiatives[J].Government Information Quarterly, 2015, 32(4):399-418.[11] Reiche, K.J., Hofig, E.: Implementation of metadata quality metrics and application on publicgovernment data. In: COMPSAC Workshops. pp. 236–241 (2013)[12] Kucera, J., Chlapek, D., Ne ˇ caský, M.: Open government data catalogs: Current approachesand quality perspective. In: ˇTechnology-Enabled Innovation for Democracy, Government andGovernance, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol.8061, pp. 152–166. Springer BerlinHeidelberg (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40160-2_13[13] Attard J, Orlandi F, Scerri S, et al. A systematic review of open government data initiatives[J].Government Information Quarterly, 2015, 32(4):399-418.[14]Carroll, J.J., Bizer, C., Hayes, P., Stickler, P.: Named graphs, provenance and trust. In:Proceedings of the 14th InternationalConference on World Wide Web. pp. 613–622. WWW ’05, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2005),http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1060745.1060835[15]Attard J, Orlandi F, Scerri S, et al. A systematic review of open government data initiatives[J].Government Information Quarterly, 2015, 32(4):399-418.[16]OKFN, 2012. Open Data Handbook. Open Knowledge Foundation.http://opendatahandbook.org/


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comparison research on open government data websites in china

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