Understanding users' accessing behaviors to local Open Government Data via transaction log analysis.

The rapid development of Open Government Data (OGD) and the increasing attention on data use/reuse have stimulated many studies on data‐related issues. However, the findability of OGD is still one of the major challenges. Aiming to ameliorate the situation that "data is hard to find", this paper examines OGD users' needs and accessing behaviors when interacting with local OGD portals. Transaction log analysis and web content mining were used in order to obtain insights from large groups of OGD users in an unobtrusive manner. Through analyzing transaction log data from three local OGD portals, including Open Data Philly (opendataphilly.org), Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (wprdc.org) and Analyze Boston (data.boston.gov), our study shows that users relied on different channels to enter local OGD portals, and such channels have different impacts on user success in finding the sought‐after data. We also find that OGD users prefer browsing over searching when inside the portals, the utilization of different browsing entries, and users' data needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]