Abstract
Open Data (OD) is one of the most discussed issue ofBig Data which raised the joint interest of public institutions,citizens and private companies since 2009. In addition totransparency in public administrations, another key objectiveof these initiatives is to allow the development of innovativeservices for solving real world problems, creating value in somepositive and constructive way. However, the massive amountof freely available data has not yet brought the expectedeffects: as of today, there is no application that has exploitedthe potential provided by large and distributed informationsources in a non-trivial way, nor any service has substantiallychanged for the better the lives of people. The era of a newgeneration applications based on open data is far to come.In this context, we observe that OD quality is one of themajor threats to achieving the goals of the OD movement. Thestarting point of this study is the quality of the OD released bythe five Constitutional offices of Italy. W3C standards aboutOD are widely known accepted in Italy by the Italian DigitalAgency (AgID). According to the most recent Italian Laws thePublic Administration may release OD according to the AgIDstandards. Our exploratory study aims to assess the qualityof such releases and the real implementations of OD. Theoutcome suggests the need of a drastic improvement in ODquality. Finally we highlight some key quality principles forOD, and propose a roadmap for further research.
