Best Practices for Sharing Public Sector Information

As a result of the Share-PSI 2.0 Thematic Network's efforts, national, sectoral and community guidelines around implementation of the (Revised) PSI Directive have been created, or updated, taking into account the information exchanged at the workshops and codified by the standards bodies. Those local guides are able to refer to specific best practices as their authors see fit.

Technical best practices and relevant background material, have been developed and collated in the W3C's Data on the Web Best Practices. However, the Share-PSI workshops identified a number of Best Practices that are non-technical and therefore out of scope for the W3C Working Group but that complement the W3C work. Taken together, these 'two sets' of Best Practices underpin the sharing of PSI and have been collated here.

Citing Best Practices

Individual Best Practices in the W3C document can be cited using the relevant URI and fragment identifier. For example, the best practice 'Provide Metadata' can be cited using http://www.w3.org/TR/dwbp/#ProvideMetadata. The summary is itself a list of citations (that is generated automatically).

The Share-PSI best practices exist as individual documents and therefore each one has its own URI, such as http://www.w3.org/2013/share-psi/bp/cas/. These URIs always resolve to the latest version of the best practice. In the unlikely situation that it is necessary to refer to a specific version of the best practice then this is possible using the 'dated URI' such as http://www.w3.org/2013/share-psi/bp/cas-20151005/. As an aside, this approach follows the W3C advice to Assign URIs to dataset versions and series.