Metadata Approaches for Government Data Publishers in the Ibero-American context

Abstract

Generating value for society from government data has become unavoidable through strategies that make them available in datasets. The datasets are an example of gathering databases that aim to be successful by standing as catalogs from the point of view of citizens, expanding the visibility of and on actions of public management. The objective is to describe the adherence to the use of metadata in datasets of governments of countries, based on the context and conceptual framework presented in the instructions for publishers of data found in open data sites of the countries analyzed. It is a descriptive investigation, focused on the critical observation of documents that address the descriptive treatment of government datasets. The bibliographic and documentary review and the definition of case studies in Colombia, Brazil, Spain, and Portugal are used as procedures. It was possible to determine the zeal of the data retainers by preferentially addressing the category metadata in use, thus giving greater importance to the practical aspect in relation to the theoretician, without disregarding the relevance of the theoretical instructions. In the content analysis, the instructions provided by the Government of Spain were observed as outstanding, where the effort to bring users closer to each other is guiding the publication of these documents; that country provided the largest number of documents available, the largest number of categories addressed, and the greatest intensity in the treatment given to each thematic component observed. It is suggested that governments implement plans aimed at improving their orientation to data publishers by providing both conceptual and practical tools, offering lengthy documents with theoretical and pragmatic components for the descriptive treatment of datasets.