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.
The Best Practices
- Policies and Legislation #policy
- Legal requirements, licenses etc. licensing of information, data and metadata
- Platforms #platforms
- Open data platform(s), publication and deployment of information, data and metadata
- Dataset criteria #criteria
- Dataset criteria, priorities, value and scope
- Charging #charging
- Charging issues and proposals
- Techniques #techniques
- Techniques for opening data, technical requirements and tools.
- Provide bulk download
- Use content negotiation for serving data available in multiple formats
- Make data available through an API
- Provide complete documentation for your API
- Avoid Breaking Changes to Your API
- Enrich data by generating new metadata
- Make feedback available
- Choose the right formalization level
- Use Web Standards as the foundation of APIs
- Provide metadata
- Provide descriptive metadata
- Provide locale parameters metadata
- Provide structural metadata
- Preserve identifiers
- Use persistent URIs as identifiers of datasets
- Use persistent URIs as identifiers within datasets
- Provide Complementary Presentations
- Provide Subsets for Large Datasets
- Provide data up to date
- Assign URIs to dataset versions and series
- Provide version history
- Provide a version indicator
- Reuse vocabularies, preferably standardized ones
- Organisation #organisation
- How to organise PSI sharing, necessary functions and communications
- Formats #formats
- Dataset structures, formats, APIs
- Reuse #reuse
- Encouraging (commercial) re-use
- Cite the Original Publication
- Make data available through an API
- Provide data license information
- Follow Licensing Terms
- Provide locale parameters metadata
- Provide structural metadata
- Use persistent URIs as identifiers of datasets
- Use persistent URIs as identifiers within datasets
- Provide Complementary Presentations
- Provide data provenance information
- Provide real-time access
- Provide Subsets for Large Datasets
- Provide version history
- Provide a version indicator
- Persistence #persistence
- Persistence and maintenance of data and metadata
- Quality #quality
- Data quality issues and solutions, quality assurance, feedback channels and evaluation.
- Enrich data by generating new metadata
- Gather feedback from data consumers
- Make feedback available
- Provide data quality information
- Preserve identifiers
- Use persistent URIs as identifiers of datasets
- Use persistent URIs as identifiers within datasets
- Provide Complementary Presentations
- Provide Feedback to the Original Publisher
- Provide data provenance information
- Assign URIs to dataset versions and series
- Provide version history
- Provide a version indicator
- Documentation #documentation
- Documentation of information/data, creation of metadata.
- Selection #selection
- Selection of information/data to be published according to various criteria.
- Discoverability #discoverability
- Data discoverability.