RE: audience for the BP doc

Let me try and explain a bit better why I think it makes sense to focus on the data publishers first and then maybe later on data consumers.

 

First of all, getting best practices for data publishers is already difficult enough. As Annette argued earlier, even feedback is something that publishers need to think about; after all, they need to provide the feedback channels. Let’s do that first and not dilute our focus trying to do too much at the same time.

 

Secondly, a re-user may not be very interested in reading about best practices related to accessing and re-using data in general; a re-user will be primarily interested in how the specific data in which he or she is interested is published by a particular set of publishers – and if these publishers follow best practice, it’s likely that the re-use of the data is made easier for the re-user. For example, if the publisher provides a feedback channel, in line with best practice, re-users will use that channel if there’s something wrong with the data. We don’t have to tell them to do that.

 

As an anecdote, at the recent Share-PSI workshop in Lisbon, there was an entrepreneur who made clear that no-one should try to tell him what to do or how to do it: he said that he and other developers were smart enough to figure out how to do things the way that makes sense to them. After all, they’re the innovators – in that sense, they may not be comparable to the “developers who write applications that interact with the data system” that Eric mentioned.

 

So, I am just afraid that best practices for developers are not going to be read by many people. Should we then put time and energy into work that might not reach its audience?

 

Makx.

 

 

From: Laufer [mailto:laufer@globo.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2014 7:57 PM
To: Bernadette Farias Lóscio
Cc: Makx Dekkers; Eric Stephan; Annette Greiner; DWBP Public List
Subject: Re: audience for the BP doc

 

Hi, All,

It is easy to see that is difficult to define exactly the audience of the BP document. We have BPs that are related to the process of better communicating to a consumer (a developer, a final user, etc.) the data in the Dataset (structure, etc.). We have things related to the use of the Dataset (license, etc.). Another set of BPs are related to how to maintain these data alive on the Web (persistence, preservation, etc.). Others are related to enhance the quality of data (quality, usage, etc.). And so on.

We have a lot of players around a Dataset. Persons that have a relation to some set of "Published Data". We can call all of them "data publishers". No problem. But these does not mean that we will have only persons with the same competences. Even if we call all of them "data publishers", IMHO, I think that we need to talk about these different types of professionals related to data publishing. In some sense, it is similar to building a set of Web Pages. We have a team of different professionals, with different competences, working to publish that pages.

Cheers,

Laufer

 

2014-12-16 16:26 GMT-02:00 Bernadette Farias Lóscio <bfl@cin.ufpe.br <mailto:bfl@cin.ufpe.br> >:

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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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


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Annette Greiner
NERSC Data and Analytics Services
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
510-495-2935 <tel:510-495-2935> 






 

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Makx Dekkers
mail@makxdekkers.com <mailto:mail@makxdekkers.com>  
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Bernadette Farias Lóscio
Centro de Informática
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco - UFPE, Brazil
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