Selection

Organizations often hold significant amount of data, but they operate under various constraints that might make selection of datasets for publication challenging. Missing or incomplete inventories of managed datasets, lack of feedback, limited resources, technical constraints or constraints that result from the legislative framework (i.e. privacy protection) are examples of the common challenges in this domain. The aim of the best practices falling under the selection element is to help publishers to identify and select suitable datasets to be made available for reuse. These best practices should help data publishers to deal with questions such as where to start when selecting datasets for publication, how to make the community aware of existing datasets and thus enable the community to provide meaningful feedback about data that is in demand or what risks should be taken into account when selecting datasets that should be made available for reuse.

Resource and other constrains might prevent publishers from publishing all the selected datasets at once. In such case release roadmap is usually developed where multiple iterations of the data release is planned over a specified period of time. When developing such a roadmap, best practices aimed at dataset criteria might be used to prioritise the dataset release.