Three Drafts Published by the Data on the Web Best Practices WG

The Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group has published three documents for which reviews are actively sought.

• The Data on the Web Best Practices document offers advice on how data of all kinds – government, research, commercial – can be shared on the Web, whether openly or not. The underlying aim is to make data intelligently available, maximizing the likelihood of its discovery and reuse. The provision of a variety of metadata, the use of URIs as identifiers and multiple access options are key to this. The Working Group believes that the document is now complete and is seeking review before the transition to Candidate Recommendation (call for implementations).

Two new vocabularies accompany the Best Practices document:

• The Dataset Usage Vocabulary offers a framework in which citations, comments, and uses of data within applications can be structured. The aim is to benefit data publishers by enabling assessment of the impact of their efforts to share data, and to benefit data users by encouraging the continued availability of data and the visibility of their own work that uses it.
• The Data Quality Vocabulary is a framework in which the quality of a dataset can be described, whether by the dataset publisher or by a broader community of users. It does not provide a formal, complete definition of quality, rather, it sets out a consistent means by which information can be provided such that a potential user of a dataset can make his/her own judgment about its fitness for purpose.

The vocabularies are seen as mature and the Working Group is seeking one last round of feedback to enable them to be published as Working Group Notes in the near future.