Analysis of UAE Open Government Data Usability within Mobile Application Development

Master’s Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Computer Science - Applied, grade: A-, course: Master of Applied Science in Information Systems Management, language: English, abstract: The aim of this study was to determine the status of the United Arab Emirates’ Open Government Data usability within the mobile application development. This was done by reviewing the usability factors to develop a mobile application and assess the OGD datasets. An assessment instrument was designed by the researcher based on the reviewed usability factors, to assess the UAE OGD datasets. From the study it was clear that major factors in mobile application development usability by OGD are data completeness, data format and support for developers by offering Application Programming Interface (API) and guides, majority of datasets were found to be complete an indication that UAE OGD has a strong point in data completeness. However, the current UAE OGD does not encourage the developers to build mobile applications because lack of data format support and missing of API and guides. Guidelines to improve the current UAE OGD have been proposed based on the results. The civil society for a number of years has been pressing the government to produce machine readable presentations of the collected data. One of the greatest Open Government Data (OGD) goal was to aid developers come up with mobile application that can improve citizen’s live and in turn also enhance the country’s economy. Mobile applications forms a powerful channel to serve and reach businesses and citizens, hence the study aims at analyzing and evaluating the present UAE OGD usability for developing mobile applications that can be used to aid UAE through identification of current OGD weaknesses and the needed solution.