Analysis about the Diffusion of Data Standards inside European Public Organizations

Abstract— One of the top objectives of European Commission, is to grant that the introduction of eGovernment does not lead to new barriers due to a lack of interoperability. In this sense, we consider Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and specifically Open Data Standards (ODS) as important in order to decrease interoperability barriers among organizations. In this paper, we investigate empirically the current state of deployment of data standards in European organizations by means of a large sample of data collected in six Public Administrations. We draw three main conclusions. First, proprietary formats still dominate in different categories. Second, the average file size is generally increasing in the last years in the sample public organizations. This can be critical in data exchange and interoperability due to increasing complexity of documents. Third, there are indications of an increase in ODS usage in the last years in the sample organizations considered.