Open Government Data: A European Perspective - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 16

To select the EU countries for the study sample, we first examined the list
of official OGD portals offered by the Data.gov platform in the “International
Countries” category. Data.gov is the main site for the U.S. government's Open Data
and also the world's largest open government website (Hendler, Holm, Musialek, &
Thomas, 2012). Of the 16 EU countries included in Data.gov, one was rejected
because its OGD website did not meet the basic standards for an open data portal.
Therefore, 15 countries, which represent 80.06% of the total EU population, were
selected for the final study sample: Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Denmark (DK),
Finland (FI), France (FR), Germany (DE), Greece (GR), Ireland (IE), Italy (IT),
Netherlands (NL), Portugal (PT), Slovak Republic (SK), Spain (ES), Sweden (SE), and
United Kingdom (UK).

1.6 Results
Following the methodology described at the outset, we now present the results of
the functional, semantic, quality, and content analysis, showing both individual-
level data for each OGD portal analyzed and data for the whole EU. These results
evidence diversity and the lack of homogeneity in the production and availability
of data within the EU.
In the functional analysis, and starting with the question of data acquisition, all
the countries analyzed present a simple document list, that is, a list of the data made
available to users, usually ordered alphabetically, but under no special criterion or
search field (see Figure 1.5). Most of them also provide the option of searching for
data by category and by free text, in which key words are entered to locate data.
Less common is the option to browse by filters and/or by agency, which is provided
by around half of the countries studied, see, for example, Austria and Italy (see
Figure 1.1). On the contrary, searching by interactive maps is available only in the
U.K. portal, which is one of the most complete OGD systems. An interactive map
displays the information in question in map form, incorporating a digital mapping
tool to optimize geoinformation search by users.

Browse by filters 73%

Free text search 80%

Browse through…

7%

Browse by categories 93%

Simple document list

100%

Browse by agency 67%

Figure 1.5 Data acquisition.