The Global Open Data Index (GODI) is a tool to educate civil society and governments about open government data publication. We do so through presenting different information, including places scores, ranking, and scores for each data category per place, and comments by our submitters and reviewers.
Even though we try to make this assessment coherent and transparent as possible, interpreting the results is not always straightforward. While open data has a very strict definition, scoring of any index is a discretional action. In real life, you can’t be partly open – either the data fit the criteria, or they do not.
This blog post will help GODI user to understand the following:
– What does the final score mean?
– How to interpret scores that vary between 0%, 40% or 70%?
– What does a score of 0% mean?
For a more thorough explanation on how to read the results, go to index.okfn.org/interpretation/
Our scoring (ranging from 0% open to 100% open) does not necessarily show a gradual improvement towards open data. In fact, we assess very different degrees of data openness – which is why any score below 100 percent only indicates that a dataset is partially open. These levels of openness include public data, access-controlled data, as well as data gaps (See GODI methodology). To understand the differences we highly recommend reading each score together with our openness icon bar (see image below).
For instance: a score of 70% can say that we found access-controlled, machine-readable data, that cannot be downloaded in bulk. **Any score below 100% means “no access”, “closed access” or “public access”**. Here we explain what each of them means, and how the data for each category look in practice.
Data is publicly accessible if the public can see it online without any access controls. It does not imply that data can be downloaded, or that it is freely reusable. Often it means that data is presented in HTML on a website.
The image above shows a search interface of a company register. It allows for targeted searches for individual companies but does not enable to retrieve all data at once. Individual search results (non-bulk)are displayed in HTML format and can then be downloaded as PDF (not machine-readable).
