Re: audience for the BP doc

Bernadette,

However, before we decide if we're gonna abandon the BP for data consumers,
I think it is really important to have an agreement about the role of data
publishers and data consumers

+1

In my point of view, data consumer concerns the one who wants to use data
available on the Web to produce "something" instead of just reading the
data. For example, when a developer uses raw data available on the Web to
develop an application, then the developer plays the role of a data
consumer and not the role of a data publisher.

+1 with the caveat that producing "something" might include the creation or
modification to data on the web. In a similar way that a database developer
works in data manipulation.

Makx - I agree that I don't think we should ask people that are already
stretched thin on the publishing side to help write.

Bernadette if it is appropriate should we put forward a proposal on a data
usage section in the DWBP document or is it too late?

Thanks,

Eric S

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Bernadette Farias Lóscio <bfl@cin.ufpe.br>
wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Thanks for your comments!
>
> I agree with Makx that it could be a good idea to concentrate on the
> audience of data providers (data publishers). However, if we do this then
> the whole discourse that was built until now has to be changed because we
> are always talking about data publication and data usage. For example, the
> first sentence of the abstract says: "This document provides best practices
> related to the publication and usage of data on the Web designed to help
> support a self-sustaining ecosystem".
>
> Moreover, the document is about "Data on the Web Best Practices" and not
> only about "Publishing Data on the Web Best Practices".
>
> As proposed in the charter, the mission of our group includes: "to develop
> the open data ecosystem, facilitating better communication between
> developers and publishers;". In this sense, I think that it is also
> important to tell developers (or data consumers in general) how they can
> interact with data publishers, i.e., how they can provide feedback to data
> publishers and also how they can provide information that helps to find out
> how data has been used.
>
> However, before we decide if we're gonna abandon the BP for data
> consumers, I think it is really important to have an agreement about the
> role of data publishers and data consumers.
>
> In my point of view, data consumer concerns the one who wants to use data
> available on the Web to produce "something" instead of just reading the
> data. For example, when a developer uses raw data available on the Web to
> develop an application, then the developer plays the role of a data
> consumer and not the role of a data publisher.
>
> Concerning data publishers, I agree with Eric that "Publishers just focus
> on hosting and administering their data on the web in an orderly way".
>
> kind regards,
> Bernadette
>
>
> 2014-12-16 8:36 GMT-03:00 Makx Dekkers <mail@makxdekkers.com>:
>
>> Eric, Annette, all,
>>
>> To me, it would make sense if we concentrated on the audience of data
>> providers, at least for now. I think this is already a big order.
>>
>> If we also want to cover best practices for the re-users of data
>> (developers, aggregators, mix-and-matchers, brokers, whatever you want to
>> call them), we’ll be spreading a scarce resource (ourselves) even thinner,
>> and run the risk of producing two sets of insufficient quality.
>>
>> Let’s focus on the data providers first and then, when we have a good set
>> of best practices and still have time left, turn our attention to the
>> consumer side of the picture.
>>
>> Makx.
>>
>>
>> 2014-12-16 6:29 GMT+01:00 Eric Stephan <ericphb@gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> Thanks Annette for sharing your thoughts on this topic in the meeting
>>> last week and in this email.  In your text the term consumers really jumped
>>> out at me.  If consumers only has a read-only connotation then I'd rather
>>> avoid this term altogether.  Actually consumers was never actually never
>>> mentioned originally as part of the working group mission, instead the term
>>> "developer" was used.
>>>
>>> Developers to me, are technologists building applications and devices
>>> that reuse published data, including creating new data that can be
>>> published, processing and modifying published data, or strictly reading
>>> data in the life span of a running application. Users rely on the tools
>>> created by publishers and developers to edit published data and provide
>>> feedback.  Publishers to me just focus on hosting and administering their
>>> data on the web in an orderly way.  Since the original intent of BP was to
>>> "facilitate better communication between developers and publishers.'  Maybe
>>> there should be best practices that target publishers and developers
>>> divided into two documents.
>>>
>>> The closest analogy is that off the shelf data storage systems two types
>>> of documentation are written:
>>> 1) Data administrators who manage the data system
>>> 2) End users (developers) who write applications that interact with the
>>> data system
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Eric S
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Annette Greiner <amgreiner@lbl.gov>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi folks,
>>>> To pick up the discussion about our audience, I want to set down what I
>>>> see as our audience for the current BP document. By audience I mean the
>>>> people we expect to actually sit down and read it, not the people whose
>>>> interests we need to consider in creating it (those are what I call
>>>> stakeholders). It’s possible that we all agree but are just thinking of the
>>>> terms differently.
>>>>
>>>> To my mind, our audience includes anyone involved in making data
>>>> available to consumers on the web. That is publishing data. It includes
>>>> anyone who collects or collates the data, organizes the data, creates web
>>>> pages or apps to share the data, re-publishes it in such a way that others
>>>> can re-use it, or makes decisions relevant to how people do those tasks.
>>>> They could be developers, lawyers, CIOs, researchers, archivists,
>>>> designers, almost any job title. What matters, though, is not their job
>>>> title but what actions they take with respect to the data. The action of
>>>> consuming it is not what we have been discussing, it isn’t represented in
>>>> any of the current best practices or in our scoping criteria, and it isn’t
>>>> called for in the charter’s requirement to create a BP document. Thus far,
>>>> we are not targeting our BPs to people who are *only* consuming the data
>>>> and not republishing it.
>>>>
>>>> I’ve already talked about the charter and the existing BPs in a
>>>> previous email, so I’ll just address the scoping criteria here. The first
>>>> one, being unique to publishing on the web, is obviously about publishing
>>>> rather than consuming. The second one, encouraging reuse, is also about
>>>> publishing, just in such a way that someone else can make use of the data.
>>>> The charter mentions re-use in its mission in list item 2, which calls on
>>>> us to "provide _guidance_to_publishers_ that will improve consistency in
>>>> the way data is managed, thus promoting the re-use of data". If a consumer
>>>> wants to publish something that makes the data truly re-usable, they must
>>>> include the data itself, which means that they are publishing the data. The
>>>> third criterion, testability, simply deals with the mechanics of making
>>>> sure that one is successful in achieving the best practices.
>>>>
>>>> It might help to consider an example: your organization publishes data
>>>> about traffic in Rio. It's made available through an API. A data scientist
>>>> in Lisbon is interested in the data and makes a visualization based on it
>>>> that she posts on her blog. The data scientist does not make the data
>>>> available in any form other than the visualization itself. She has not
>>>> really enriched your data, because the original data still has no
>>>> connection to the visualization. She cannot take action on any of the best
>>>> practices we have identified thus far unless she re-publishes it herself,
>>>> as data.
>>>>
>>>> Your organization could link to the visualization, thereby enriching
>>>> the data, but the data scientist in Lisbon cannot force it to do that. Our
>>>> best practice around data enrichment calls on publishers to consider making
>>>> that link or creating the visualization themselves. If we were writing that
>>>> same best practice for a consumer audience, it would have to say something
>>>> like "you should enrich other people's data". So, we would end up telling
>>>> data enrichers that they should enrich data, which strikes me as
>>>> tautological. One could go into detail about how to make good
>>>> visualizations (use good labels, don’t rely on color alone, provide a zero
>>>> point in your scales, etc.), but that seems to me out of scope. (I teach an
>>>> entire semester course on visualization, so I could come up with lots of
>>>> best practices about it, but I don't think we want to go there in the BP
>>>> document we’ve been working on.)
>>>>
>>>> Now suppose the consumer in Lisbon would like to provide feedback. If
>>>> we, as the publisher, have not provided a mechanism for them to do so, they
>>>> cannot provide it. Our best practice is about making it possible to provide
>>>> feedback and then acting on the feedback to improve the published data. A
>>>> consumer has a role here, but again, there is little point to telling a
>>>> consumer who wants to give feedback that they should give feedback. I
>>>> certainly wouldn’t expect a data consumer to wade through a long list of
>>>> publisher-oriented best practices to be told that they should give feedback
>>>> whenever they are so inclined.
>>>>
>>>> I would support the idea of putting together a separate list of best
>>>> practices for data consumers if we can think of a way to scope it that
>>>> works.
>>>>
>>>> -Annette
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Annette Greiner
>>>> NERSC Data and Analytics Services
>>>> Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
>>>> 510-495-2935
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Makx Dekkers
>> mail@makxdekkers.com
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>
>
> --
> Bernadette Farias Lóscio
> Centro de Informática
> Universidade Federal de Pernambuco - UFPE, Brazil
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>