(Revised) PSI Directive Theme: Techniques
The (Revised) PSI Directive mandates EU member states to open-up public sector information, previously inaccessible to citizens. An increasing number of governmental, non-governmental or private organizations therefore publish sets of data in public space, covering domains such as healthcare, education, cultural heritage, financial, transportation etc.
Once on the Web, data become the bridge between data owners / publishers and the data consumers, which raises several technical challenges on both sides, such as: how to make the published data searchable, discoverable, machine-readable or accessible? What formats are appropriate for publishing data? How can data owners increase the interoperability of published data? What techniques / tools exists to cope with modifications of data already published?
To address these issues, we seek to provide guidance to stakeholders, through a set of good practices that apply to multiple technologies, that aims at improving the consistency in the way data is published and consumed on the Web. Providing structured metadata, using well-established ontologies, implementing data versioning, providing bulk data download are examples of recommendations covered by this section.
- 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