RE: audience for the BP doc

I think this is a really important message that we should try to convey:

 

(BTW, I think we should be trying to get publishers to think of putting
data on the web as more than merely hosting files and administering the
data. In fact, we have a list of things they should be thinking about:
the best practices document.)

 

So double-plus to Annette!

 

Makx.

 

 

From: Annette Greiner [mailto:amgreiner@lbl.gov] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2014 8:06 PM
To: Bernadette Farias Lóscio
Cc: Makx Dekkers; Eric Stephan; DWBP Public List
Subject: Re: audience for the BP doc

 

I think we need to have non-normative material that matches our
normative material. This discussion started up because we have a
disconnect there. If we want to keep the introduction as is, we would
need to change the best practices we are developing, broadening the
scope considerably. I think it’s much less work to make the introduction
work for the content it’s meant to introduce. I’d be happy to take a
stab at rewriting if you like. My feeling is that it doesn’t really need
to change all that much, because we do want to still mention the
importance of considering usage when you publish. (BTW, I think we
should be trying to get publishers to think of putting data on the web
as more than merely hosting files and administering the data. In fact,
we have a list of things they should be thinking about: the best
practices document.)

-Annette

 

--
Annette Greiner
NERSC Data and Analytics Services
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
510-495-2935

 

On Dec 16, 2014, at 10:26 AM, Bernadette Farias Lóscio <bfl@cin.ufpe.br
<mailto: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
<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


--
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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