Educational Open Government Data in Germany: The Landscape, Status, and Quality

This paper examines the educational datasets of Open Government Portals (OGPs) in Germany. While OGPs has become an important player in making public data available, the quality and coverage are increasingly problematized. This study analyzes the quality of 28 OGPs, 18 on the city-level, seven on the state-level (the city-states of Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen were counted as states), and three at the national level. The focus of this study is on identifying the gap in open educational data. The results show that the total number of datasets and the educational data varies very much between the portals. While the portals contain 94% ‘open’ datasets, most of the portals do not provide comprehensive usage metrics like the data download, evidence of usage in research or applications. Finally, the paper highlights the main shortcomings of the existing open data portals regarding the quality of datasets and the lack of findability and granularity.