A framework to evaluate information quality in Public Administration websites

The paper presents a framework aimed at assessing the capacity of Public Administration bodies (PA) to offer a good quality of information and service on their web portals. Our framework is based on the extraction of ".it" domain names registered by Italian public institutions and the subsequent analysis of their relative websites. The analysis foresees an automatic gathering of the web pages of PA portals by means of web crawling and an assessment of the quality of their online information services. This assessment is carried out by verifying their compliance with current legislation on the basis of the criteria established in government guidelines. This approach provides an ongoing monitoring process of the PA websites that can contribute to the improvement of their overall quality. Moreover, our approach can also hopefully be of benefit to local governments in other countries.