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Tracking rates of change of Open Data Portals

Many of our reports note that most open data is ephemeral and that it regularly disappears or is overwritten. We informally tracked this rate of change during two periods.

Warning

These are internal numbers that are for BTAA-GIN program tracking purposes. They should not be used for research or analysis in other contexts. Contact the data providers to verify this information for other projects.

March 2017 to December 2018

From March 2017 to December 2018, the BTAA GDP Metadata Coordinator tracked the number of items that were deleted and added to 15 ArcGIS Open Data Portals (now calle "Hubs). These were ingested on a monthly basis into the BTAA Geoportal.

Note

Cells with a dash "-" indicate that the portal had not been added to our collection yet.

Items Deleted by selected ArcGIS Open Data Portals

Date 2017-03 2017-04 2017-07 2017-08 2017-09 2017-10 2017-11 2017-12 2017-01 2018-02 2018-03 2018-04 2018-05 2018-06 2018-07 2018-11 2018-12 Sum
District of Columbia Open Data - - - 2 0 0 49 225 17 2 5 5 3 0 26 137 33 504
GeOhio - - - 0 0 0 0 0 20 16 7 78 12 4 0 174 20 331
Harford County GIS Data - - - 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 33 33
Indianapolis Open Data - - - 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 6 1 2 0 0 0 2 11
IowaDOT - - - 10 0 19 3 1 4 0 1 8 0 0 0 203 16 265
Lake County Illinois Open Data Portal - - - 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 362 156 518
Maryland iMap - - - 11 3 2 1 1 1 1 9 1 4 0 3 5 3 45
Michigan DNR - - - - - 6 11 13 15 77 2 1 2 0 73 stopped harvesting - 200
Minneapolis Open Data - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 16 16
Peoria County GIS Open Data Portal - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1 1
SEMCOG 0 8 0 0 0 4 0 0 0 9 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 22
State of Michigan Open Data Portal 62 0 133 165 0 6 14 13 18 80 2 4 2 0 73 5 8 585
Washington County, MN - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2 0 2
Sum 62 8 133 188 3 37 78 253 75 186 32 98 25 4 176 888 292 2538

Items Added by selected ArcGIS Open Data Portals

Date 2017-03 2017-04 2017-07 2017-08 2017-09 2017-10 2017-11 2017-12 2017-01 2018-02 2018-03 2018-04 2018-05 2018-06 2018-07 2018-11 2018-12 Sum
District of Columbia Open Data - - - 9 0 0 62 3 25 10 16 22 32 - 27 137 33 376
GeOhio - - - - - - - - 54 14 4 29 17 29 0 173 20 340
Harford County GIS Data - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 35 35
Indianapolis Open Data - - - - - - - - - - 1 0 5 0 0 0 3 9
IowaDOT - - - 3 0 17 16 3 19 0 0 3 0 0 0 138 27 226
Lake County Illinois Open Data Portal - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 362 140 502
Maryland iMap - - - 17 0 7 0 9 22 168 11 6 5 0 12 6 7 270
Michigan DNR - - - - - 20 6 105 102 5 9 5 26 0 31 retired from portal - 309
Minneapolis Open Data - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 0 0
Peoria County GIS Open Data Portal - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 0 0
SEMCOG - 15 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 24
State of Michigan Open Data Portal 20 0 0 254 0 27 14 105 110 10 9 8 26 - 31 9 3 626
Washington County, MN - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 5 0 5
Sum 20 15 0 283 0 74 98 225 332 214 50 73 111 29 102 830 268 2724

March - September 2023

By 2023, our metadata collections had grown considerably and we again tracked the rate of change for:

  • 67 ArcGIS Hubs
  • 1 custom state data portal (PASDA)
  • 3 CKAN data portals (State of Minnesota, OpenDataPhilly, and CMAP (Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning) Data Hub

2599 total datasets were removed from the portals during that time and, presumably, replaced.

Month Number deleted
March 2023 94
April 2023 148
May 2023 92
June 2023 213
July 2023 150
August 2023 780
September 2023 1122