A Rubric-Driven Evaluation of Open Data Portals and Their Data in Transportation

The open data movement has been gaining momentum in the Transportation industry in recent years, with multiple State Departments of Transportation (DOT) launching their own repository of datasets. These actions offer the potential to improve both transportation safety and mobility. That said, an examination of the quality of data, ease of use, and availability of metadata across agencies revealed a significant variation among them and presented a serious concern to realizing the full potential of these principled efforts. This study highlights the imminent need for agency support towards assessing data warehouse quality and in establishing an index to measure performance. The approach includes a data portal evaluation rubric (DPER) that captures the essence of the National Open Data Policy. Its metrics are devised from practices implemented across several agencies to ensure the effective use of open data. The proposed DPER was applied to 43 transportation-related open data portals at the state (39) and national level (4). The DPER examines the quality, the openness of data, and the relevance of published content to the Transportation industry. The evaluation found that the portal hosted by the state of New York scored the highest due to its user-friendly interface with interactive visualization tools, relevant data content, detailed information about the data, and the useful API (Application Program Interface) references for application developers. The absolute scramble by agencies to fight the life-impacting events of 2020 emphasizes both the need and urgency to provide standardized, accessible, and accurate data for a ubiquitous audience.