By Ramine Tinati, Web and Internet Science, University of Southampton

Software sustainability is, more often than not, seen to be limited to the development and maintenance of platforms, software systems and applications. But sustainability can encompass much more, especially when dealing with new and developing activities on the Web. In the WAIS group, we are using a new platform, called ROAR, to examine the sustainability of Open Government Data. We have shown that some governments are champions of open data, while others show less of an interest.

Over recent years, the drive for Open Data - specifically, Open Government Data (OGD) - has become an increasingly popular Web activity, driven by Governments, civic organisations, businesses, developers, researchers and citizens. The concept driving the OGD initiative is a fairly simple in theory, but complex in practice: governments need to release their data for public consumption. As with any large-scale initiative, there are a number of interconnected social, economic, political, financial, legal, and technological barriers that must be overcome to enable sustainable OGD communities. A battle of licensing, policy, cultural change, and economic value stand in the way of progress. Technologically, the push for OGD has led to a number of developments in new and existing technologies, including the Semantic Web and Linked Data, which aim to provide the newly freed data with a linked data infrastructure. There has also been the development of new software platforms, such as CKAN and Socrata, which house and manage the data and provide simple interfaces for data access.

How can sustainability be measured? If OGD is examined as a network of stakeholders, its sustainability could be investigated through qualitative means: through interviews, observations, etc. Quantitative methods can also be used, such as monitoring and tracking the publicly available government data. This provides a truthful, unbiased perspective on the overall success of the network. Ultimately, the amount of available data is a reflection of the efforts of the stakeholders involved.

I use ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) to examine the sustainability of OGD initiatives. ROAR is a platform that enables the monitoring of dataset deposits within repositories and data catalogues, providing a way to examine the frequency and size of deposits over a period of time. Based on these measurements, the overall health of the data catalogues can be determined. A healthy catalogue can be classified as one which has a regular frequency of large deposits, thus constantly increasing the size of the available data.

We are currently tracking a number of Open Government Data portals such as data.gov (the US catalogue of open data) and data.gov.uk (the UK equivalent). By examining the health of these portals, we aim to provide a service to encourage transparency on the continuous efforts being made within OGD, raising awareness of the actions of the data publishers. To date, we have been identified a mix of commitment levels towards the publication of government data, with the UK and the US (who were champions of the OGD initiative) demonstrating healthy signs of sustainability, unlike others (naming no names), whose commitment is questionable.

This is just the beginning of an emerging Web activity, and as the number of new OGD communities and portals emerge over the coming months, ROAR will provide the tools required to assess the sustainability of OGD.