Using Metadata Standards at the City of Seattle
As mentioned in my first blog post, I’m working on a project this summer to examine the use of civic metadata standards at cities across the US, with a goal of making some recommendations for the Open Data Program at the City of Seattle. In my second blog post, I covered some of the challenges surrounding how metadata standards are used and I described how metadata standards are a huge contributor to accessibility. In this post, which is the final post about my project, I’ll discuss what I learned, the recommendations I’m making, and the ways this work will be important for the future.
The report I’ve written, entitled A Policy Analysis of Civic Metadata Standards and Implications for the City of Seattle Open Data Program (available here), was compiled in order to help the City of Seattle accomplish some of the goals set forth in the City’s 2017 Open Data Plan. Two of the goals in the Plan are to improve the quality of the current open data platform and to increase the discoverability of datasets for use by members of the public. Upon recognizing that metadata is a contributing factor to the quality, discoverability, and accessibility of datasets, I focused my work on researching how using metadata standards could be implemented in order to help the City of Seattle achieve these goals.
As a part of my report, I analyzed the current work of seven cities: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. About half of these cities have done a substantial amount of research and have implemented customized metadata standards that match the specific policies and practices of each individual city. The other cities have not done as much work on metadata standards and have usually chosen to adopt the recommended out-of-the-box solutions provided the the open data web portals. In addition to this work at the city level, the federal government has also developed a standard, called Project Open Data Metadata Schema v1.1, which nearly all federal agencies use.
Based on this research, I am recommending that the City of Seattle follow the guidance of the federal government and adopt the Project Open Data Metadata Schema v1.1. This metadata standard is widely recognized, has plenty of available documentation, and should be straightforward for the City of Seattle to implement. In my forthcoming report, you can read more about the technical details of why this standard is a strong choice. In addition, I’m also recommending that the City of Seattle begin to include data dictionaries or column-level descriptors for all datasets, encourage departments to proactively consider metadata and dataset usability, and conduct and audit of the datasets that are available on the portal. These recommendations will go a long way toward cleaning up the datasets that are currently on the portal and will provide a strong basis for future work.
Within the next three to five years, I anticipate that open data will become more prevalent, especially because the use of internet-connected devices continues to increase. The City of Seattle has plans to continue to do work related to the Smart Cities Movement, which relies heavily on data from Internet of Things devices. Using a metadata standard will support the City’s efforts leverage data internally and will also be helpful for sharing data with regional and national partners. In the short term, metadata standards will enable the City to fulfill the goals of the 2017 Open Data Plan. Looking toward the future, metadata standards will strengthen the datasets published in the Open Data Portal, helping the Open Data Program be well-prepared for the years to come.
