An Assessment of Adoption and Quality of Linked Data in European Open Government Data

The European Commission has adopted Linked Data principles and practices with the purpose of increasing the accessibility, inter-operability and value of the data that is made available openly by European public sector organisations. This includes investment in metadata development for describing open datasets, catalogs of resources with persistent URIs, and the European Data Portal (EDP), which provides a single point of access, search and exploration of European open data. As the Public Sector Initiative (PSI) Directive is being revised, a critical question for the Commission is the extent to which open government data publishers have adopted Linked Data, and how they are applying the underlying technologies. In this paper, we undertake a quantitative analysis to support this. We explore if and how open data portals indexed by the EDP are using Linked Data and assess the quality of the datasets according to multiple dimensions.