Best Practices/Use simple and distributed tools

Use simple and distributed tools for (meta)data publication

Outline

Use simple and distributed tools for (meta)data publication that’s output is both human readable and centrally machine-searchable and which’s creation is as close to the source as possible. This will help increase the benefits to the data source, as it is a low-cost implementation that is easy to scale and has less administrative burden.

Links to the Revised PSI Directive

Techniques, Formats, Documentation

Challenge

Different agencies in the public sector are struggling with high cost and administrative burden with (meta)data publication. Most tools expect to enter data centrally, which prolongs and complicates the process of publication, creates access management hurdles and needs data management expertise.

Solution

Process

Use simple and distributed tools that help public servants themselves describe (meta)data in their accustomed environment. The process is as in the image.

A precondition is the need for applying the following Best Practice: 16. Establish Open Government Portal for data sharing.

Why is this a Best Practice?

This practice will lower the barriers of (meta)data management. The practice enables the following benefits:

• a lot more public servants can take part in (meta)data creation and verification;
• the public agencies hold (and govern themselves) the data in their own environment;
• the creation of (meta)data is in close to the source of the data itself;
• no need for centrally managed individual access management;
• no need for central (meta)data collection forms.

With this you can still have the benefits of a centralised system:

• search over all data sets as they get published in the central portal;
• have an overview of and trust in who (based on agency, not persons) publishes the data;
• high (meta)data quality as it will be verified and cleaned by the creators.

How do I implement this Best Practice?

1. Identify which office software the public servants use for their daily life (eg Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Spreadsheet etc);
2. Select (or agree on) an intermediate data structure/format (eg CSV with agreed column names/descriptions);
3. Select an existing (or develop a new) set of tools to push the data to a publication portal (eg a harvester and a national portal, European Open Data Portal);
4. Appoint a person responsible for maintaining the data structure/format, support the use of tools;
5. Configure the tools to collect the distributed data to be published to the portal;
6. Document and train, how the public servant can create the data themselves;
7. Monitor and support the use of selected tools (by the appointed person).

Where has this best practice been implemented?

• Estonia - Public service catalogue, Andres Kütt, Estonian Information System Architect, Estonian Information System Authority

References

• Berlin Workshop Talk: Estonian metadata reference architecture

Contact Info

Hannes Kiivet, advisor, Estonian Information System Authority

Related Best Practices

• Enable feedback channels for improving the quality of existing government data
• Enable quality assessment of open data
• Develop a federation tool for open data portals