While I was developing my government funded prototype „Automated City Open Data Census“ for Germany I was so deep into scrambling with metadata that I decided to take a closer look at the types and formats that get published.
So I used the CKAN API to get basic data from CKAN about licenses used, data formats and categories.
A few not so supering facts are that not fully open licenes still dominate the field and PDF is the most published data format in Germany.
And then I thought I could take a closer look into the US portal run by the federal government (data.gov) which is a CKAN based portal. And they aggregate data from states, counties and cities in the US.
It is fast and updates automatically because it is using the API rather than a static file.
The most used format is a blank format, which means the metadata is not correct. Which is unfortunate. The second most used data format is HTML. Which is weird as well. But I see this often with data portals, they just link to a page and not to a dataset and then CKAN assumes it is just HTML and not the actual data format.
Or let’s take a look at the licences used by gov.data. The most used license is the us-pd which is the U.S. Government Works license.
usually prepared by officers or employees of the United States government as part of their official duties
Which is a great sign that most of the licenses in the US is an open license. That is not the case in Germany.