Quality study of open government data related to COVID-19 in Latin America

Abstract

This work shows the current situation of Open Government at a Latin American level focused on the quality of available open data related to COVID-19. The analyzed data refers to health emergencies and tasks for the fight against the pandemic. These data are critical because they are used to improve the management of public services and resources in handling this contingency. The different quality aspects of open data that are available on government portals have been analyzed. For this analysis, a number of documents of recognized international organizations on aspects, current problems, and good practices were taken as a reference. To accomplish this research, six countries were chosen as a data source: Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay. For each of them, their public portals were analyzed, and special attention was paid to the quality aspects that each country proposes, as well as whether there are dataset control tools or not. Finally, the tool HEVDA was used to verify the quality of open data based on a proposal of 8 quality metrics. The tool was applied to a sample of 15 datasets from each country in aspects of COVID-19 (90 datasets). The contribution of this work is to identify the degree of quality presented by the open data of these countries through a self-developed validation tool (HEVDA).