#dataportal

I found an interesting paper on open government data portals:

Tailoring open government data portals for lay citizens: A gamification theory approach Anthony Simonofski, Anneke Zuiderwijk, Antoine Clarinvala, Wafa Hammedi https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401222000421

I learned from the paper that most open government portals work best for expert users. The researchers proposed a gamification approach to "simplify" the portals for lay citizens. Games are the inspiration for gamification, which uses elements from games to improve the user's experience with the portal in a fun and more engaging way.

The researchers collected lay citizen's requirements for open government portals in order to consider user input for their design of a prototype of the gamified portal. The requirements provide insight into what the public wants the sites to include and how they should work (the researchers interviewed only 10 lay citizens). I thought the requirements would be useful for other areas, such as websites that provide online reviews.

I found the comparison between requirements by lay citizens and expert users interesting. Their requirements do conflict. Gamification improved the ease of use (or usability) of the portal for the lay citizens.

The beta-version of the Japanese open data portal was launched at data.go.jp on the morning of Dec. 20, 2013. This is a major step forward for Japanese open government. 

There are more than 9,000 data sets published, using C-KAN and NetCommons, available under CC-BY 2.1 JP. 

The data released this time are predominantly the stuff that have already been published on the web. But open licensing, meta data, and search-ability are among the improvements. 

The launch is a much-awaited development among the OD community. The portal's beta launch was scheduled to be in the first half of the FY 2013, which means by the end of September, according to the roadmap document published in June 2013. The G8 open data action plan from Japan (english version here) published in late-October showed a slightly revised schedule, suggesting a launch by the end of the fall of '13.