What is Public Data Provision & Quality?
Public data provision and quality management, told as a story about the student council posting data on the board and regularly checking its quality.
The information students want sits inside the council alone.Data you can only learn by asking isn't truly open.
An information gap opens up — classes that hear, and classes that don't.When the council doesn't post its data, classes that hear the rumor get ahead of classes that don't.
Public data provision means an agency opening up its data, like posting it on a board where anyone can see it.Whoever posts the data also answers for keeping it fresh and accurate.
Public data quality is checked against items like completeness, accuracy, consistency, and timeliness.These four key checks help make data actually usable.
Posting data doesn't automatically make it useful.Posting data isn't the end — it still needs a usable format and ongoing quality checks.
Public data provision & quality = posting data where anyone can see it, and continuing to look after its completeness, accuracy, consistency, and timeliness.
Korea's Public Data Act requires public agencies to publish the data they hold (except what the law excludes, such as non-disclosable information) in a machine-readable form, open for anyone to freely use and redistribute. Beyond simply publishing it, quality indicators such as completeness, accuracy, consistency, and timeliness, along with registered metadata, have to be managed too for the data to actually be usable.
When grown-ups say it
- Public Data
- Data a public agency holds that, as a rule, must be published. Publishing it is a legal obligation.
- Completeness
- Nothing is missing from the record. The first row on the quality checklist.
- Accuracy
- Nothing in it is wrong. If a value is wrong, nobody can rely on the data.
- Timeliness
- Updating it the moment something changes. Stale data loses its usefulness even if it's public.
- Metadata
- The tag that explains what the data is. Without it, data is hard to find or understand.
- Open Standard Format
- A common format anyone can read. A scanned photo or PDF is hard to reuse.
- Quality Management Evaluation
- A system that evaluates how well agencies manage data quality. Data needs ongoing checks even after it's published.
- Linked Open Data
- Tagging data with IDs and linking records together. The format and linking technique are covered in depth in another field. → the warehouse that opens its door and links its tags