Perhaps four-fifths of the data that have been released are not particularly useful, reckons Joel Gurin of the Centre for Open Data Enterprise, a think-tank in Washington. America’s cache includes a list of the last words of those executed by the state of Texas, for example. The rest is often missing some of the “metadata”—descriptive tags without which the raw information can be meaningless. In some developing countries, official data are so shoddy that businesses prefer to collect information themselves.
Searching open-data portals is often an arduous task. Working out which source is most useful is tricky when dozens have the same information. Registers that were built for administrative purposes only have not yet been redesigned into databases that can be sorted, analysed and matched with other data. Some sets are not kept up-to-date in the portals—a common problem for government-spending records, for example.
Gavin Starks of the Open Data Institute, a non-profit, points to a shortage of data-handling skills among officials, activists and journalists. It is not just that only a few people possess specialist skills, he says; many lack the ability to interpret figures. Mr Starks cites the example of British MPs, most of whom could not solve a simple maths test involving two probabilities.
