Assessment of Open Data Portals: A Brazilian case study

A suitable open data portal is an important requirement for succeeding in the provision of open data, since is a central point of access for datasets which allows data to be found easily. Although evidences of benefits of keeping city data open have been reported, clear evidences of public policies derived from data exploitation or data-driven applications for societal changes are still few or at least not clear to the communities spending their time and energy at data collecting, publishing and processing as well as to those communities putting efforts to contribute with new perspectives or approaches to the city development. This paper evaluates seven Brazilian open data portals, using as criteria data access, dataset characteristics, metadata and dataset schema. The paper also provide insights on spatial open data exploitation and challenges based on the author's experience, exploring since 2014 the open data of Curitiba.