Syntactical Heuristics for the Open Data Quality Assessment and Their Applications

Open Government Data are valuable initiatives in favour of transparency, accountability, and openness. The expectation is to increase participation by engaging citizens, non-profit organisations, and companies in reusing Open Data (OD). A potential barrier in the exploitation of OD and engagement of the target audience is the low quality of available datasets [3, 14, 16]. Non-technical consumers are often unaware that data could have potential quality issues, taking for grant that datasets can be used immediately without any further manipulation. In reality, in order to reuse data, for instance to create visualisations, they need to perform a data clean, which requires time, resources, and proper skills. This leads to a reduced chance to involve citizens.