A Study Of An Evaluation Method Towards Open Government Data And Its Application:Based On Benchmarking

Open government data is beneficial to the whole society as a more extensive and efficient way of making use of public data to create economic and social value. The open government data, can not only help the government to improve their transparency and administrative efficiency, as well as their governing capacities, but also be treated as an important impetus for promoting economic development and social innovation. On a global scale, open government data has been echoed by many countries as a trend. An increasing number of governments and national institutions have been actively drafted their open government data plans, and hundreds of countries and regions all over the world have established their open government data portals.In China, there have already been some local governments launched their open government data projects and established some open data platforms. So far, however, China’s practice of opening up government data for public use are at a low level, when compared with the best practice worldwide. Finding out the way to evaluate the existing Chinese open government data portals and identify the development gaps between ours and international advanced open data projects, will contribute to the future development of Chinese open government data, in the hope of continuous improvement. So it is quite essential to establish a systematic and reasonable method, and to assess the domestic open government data projects with it. Only by evaluating them objectively, can we promote Chinese open government data to a deeper and wider level and make the whole society to access open government data more easily, thus making use of them to create more economic and social value.This study have proposed an evaluation method towards open government data project with the perspective of open government data sets in open data portals, which is also a result of the study of assessment practice and theory to open government data project home and abroad, and a result of reference for the ideology and methodology of benchmarking theory. Then apply this method by evaluating the data sets of open government data portals of New York City, which is the benchmark, and Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai.According to the evaluation result, we can see the different gaps between Chinese cities’open government data portals and the NYC Open data portal, which can be treated as a best practice of open government data in the world, both from the scale and the openness level. The last part of this paper put forward a set of relevant advices and improvement suggestions for the future development of Chinese open government data.