RE: Working on FPWD, more to do

The benefit of a maturity model is that we don't have to define for others
what the best practice in any given situation is.  We can provide between 5
and 7 levels of maturity and allow every reader to determine for themselves
where they are today, what they want to achieve, and what steps they are
willing to undertake to achieve a higher level of maturity.

IBM open sourced the Data Governance Council Maturity Model in 2010.  Here
are the categories:



The complete model is available here:
http://www.infogovcommunity.com/resources





Best Regards,

Steve

Motto: "Do First, Think, Do it Again"


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  |"Makx Dekkers" <mail@makxdekkers.com>                                                                                                             |
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  |"'Public DWBP WG'" <public-dwbp-wg@w3.org>                                                                                                        |
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  |02/05/2015 03:11 AM                                                                                                                               |
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  |RE: Working on FPWD, more to do                                                                                                                   |
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I also like Steve’s approach, but it brings me back to an earlier question:
What is *best* practice?

In a way, a maturity model describes what is good, better, best practice as
you move up the ladder. But how does someone (us in this case) determine
what is good, better, best?

As far as I can see, we try to define best practice based on our personal
opinions – of course backed by our individual and collective knowledge and
experience – but we don’t seem to consider any type of metrics or arguments
that justify why something is better practice than something else.

I posed that question earlier on BP#1
http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/bp.html#metadata. I think that a statement like
“in an open information space, metadata is essential” is an opinion, but
one that needs to be qualified, especially because you could argue that in
the current Web environment this has been demonstrated *not* to be true.
Data can be discovered and re-used even without metadata as long as it is
harvested by a search engine; actually, in the current environment of the
open Web, a landing page with good SEO is probably a better way of creating
high visibility than DCAT metadata.

On the other hand, if you want to build a catalogue of datasets like
http://datahub.io/, or want your datasets to be listed on such a portal,
then of course metadata is the way to go to enable harvesting.

So, thinking further on Steve’s maturity model, we could have levels like:

Put your data on the Web and

      0.       Do not provide any information about your data. If you
      don’t, your data can only be found by people who know about it, so
      you don’t encourage wide re-use – NOT SO GOOD (but of course, someone
      might have good reasons to keep their data out of the spotlight)
      1.       Provide a landing page. This allows the information to be
      picked up by search engines. If you’re doing some smart SEO in
      addition, it will make your data will make it visible, facilitating
      more re-use – BETTER
      2.       Provide metadata that describes the data. This may increase
      visibility on search engines (e.g. using schema.org) but it is really
      essential if you want your data to be visible on portals like the
      DataHub; these portal services require metadata to be available for
      harvesting – BETTER
      3.       Provide both a landing page and standardised metadata: this
      makes your data visible through search engines and allows your data
      to be included in data portals which maximises visibility and re-use
      – BEST

Such a ladder gives advice on what to do and why: what happens if you do
and what happens if you don’t.

In that way, we don’t tell people what they MUST or SHOULD do, we provide
advice that they can follow or not, depending on their objectives,
resources etc.

Makx.




From: Steven Adler [mailto:adler1@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2015 9:18 PM
To: Eric
Cc: Annette Greiner; Bernadette Farias Lóscio; Phil Archer; Public DWBP WG
Subject: Re: Working on FPWD, more to do



I feel a little nervous about weighing in here but here goes.  I am OK with
removing normative statements in this version of the BP document and I
appreciate the desire to describe rather than prescribe practices.  But I
also feel that we need to get more specific about our descriptions in
future versions of the document.  An approach we can take in that regards
is to develop our descriptions in a Maturity Model framework, which plots
different levels of observed behaviors across increasing levels of
maturity, allow the readers to discover for themselves how their own
practices compare to other levels of maturity and decide where they are and
what they want to achieve.