Csaba Csáki

Quality Issues of Public Procurement Open Data

The previous decade has witnessed numerous open data initiatives by various levels of government around the globe to promote transparency and accountability. One crucial area is government spending or public procurement. This paper reports on an attempt to utilize purchasing data published under the international open data program of the European Union aimed at making available all expenditure data over certain thresholds from 33 European countries. The data had been planned to be used in research aimed at investigating spending and contract awarding patterns within the EU. However, the structure and quality of the data as it has been published in CSV format leave questions about accountability, and this paper serves as a functional primer warning beginner-users of the experientially-based issues of utilizing this and other open data. Key messages include that given its size and complexity this dataset is not for the faint of heart and that no current quality frameworks appear readily able to help.

Open Data Research Challenges in the EU.

Although the concept of ‘open data’ has been around for some time, it has gained more attention in the public sphere over the last decade. This momentum has attracted the interest of ‘mainstream’ e-Government researchers as well, what is well indicated by the increased number of papers addressing the topic. Even though this interest seemed to be declining two-three years ago, the idea of reusing public sector data provided new ammunition to do research into this phenomenon. This paper relies on the latest literature and relevant studies to review the research area of open government data and to offer recommendations regarding potential research directions that could advance our understanding of the challenges facing the reuse of public sector information.

Towards Open Data Quality Improvements Based on Root Cause Analysis of Quality Issues

Commercial reuse of open government data in value added services has gained a lot of interest both as practice and as a research topic over the last few years. However, utilizing open data without proper understanding of potential quality issues carries the risk of undermining the value of the service that relies on public sector information. Instead of establishing a data quality assessment framework this research considers a review of typical open data quality issues and intends to connect them to the causes leading to these various data problems. Open data specific problems are concluded from a case study and then theoretical and empirical arguments are used to connect them to root causes emerging from the peculiarities of the public sector data management process. This way both practitioners could be more conscious about appropriate cleansing methods and participants shaping the data management process could aim at eliminating root causes of data quality issues.

A nyílt kormányzati adatok kutatási kihívásai

Habar a nyilt adatok koncepcioja mar regota ismert, komolyabb praktikus erdeklődesről a kozszfera reszeről korulbelul egy evtizede lehet beszelni. Ez a momentum megmozgatta az e-kormanyzas ’fősodraba’ tartozo kutatok erdeklődeset is, mely meg is latszik a vonatkozo publikaciok megemelkedett szaman. Habar ket-harom eve visszaesni latszott a lendulet, az ujrahasznositas jelensege ujabb municiot szolgaltatott a kutatasoknak. Jelen tanulmany a legfrissebb irodalom es esettanulmanyok segitsegevel tekinti at a nyilt kormanyzati adatok kutatasanak jellemző teruleteit es javaslatokat fogalmaz meg olyan kutatasi kerdesekre, melyek nemcsak előrebb vihetik a nyilt kormanyzati adatok ujrahasznositasanak kerdeseit, de iranyt mutathatnak hazai kutatoknak is a sikeres nemzetkozi megjeleneshez.

Understanding the scientific contribution of an international community of researchers: the case of the IFIP WG 8.3 Conferences on DSS (1982–2014)

Abstract From its foundation in 1981, the goal of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 8.3 has been to share ideas about the design, development, use, and impact of systems intended to support decision makers and about the process of decision-making – in other words, to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge in the field of decision support systems (DSS). The working group organised its first conference in 1982 and up to 2014, the group has held twenty major conferences with published proceedings. These proceedings include over six hundred papers authored by researchers from over fifty countries. This paper presents the story of the group and the contribution of its members via a bibliometric analysis of the conference corpus. This analysis examines the themes and domains of the papers published by the working group over the decades. This includes statistics on the country, institutional and individual contributions as well as citations and referencing history. The paper concludes with a systematic review of the contribution of the international community of researchers who have become members of the working group over the years.