Re: Meaning of publishing Data on the Web

I think documents are generally not data. For the others, I think it depends on intention. Sometimes audio, image, or video are data, for example in social science research where interactions between subjects are videotaped, or in neuroscience where audio recordings of speech are captured. I think it's pretty rare for people to want to publish those media files as raw data rather than as coded numeric values. Usually, I think, audio, image, and video are *enrichments* of data, but again, it depends on the intention. 

Take the example of a CCD camera collecting photons in an experiment. That is essentially the same camera that you have in your iPhone. The CCD camera might generate data that indicate the number of photons detected at each point in an array in x and y. For each x,y point, there is an intensity measured. You can then take that data and plot it in a graph (in any of several ways), or you can show it as an image (basically a heatmap). Those are both visualizations of the data, but the data are the individual values for intensity at x and y. Your iPhone collects the exact same kind of data and shows you the heatmap visualization as a "photo". In a way, that's enriched data, but the intention is certainly not to use it as data. I think what we are talking about in this group is how to share the sets of values that are intended as data, so that others can reuse, visualize, enrich as they like. I also think that providing some enrichment of the data is a best practice as well. One could even consider that as a form of making the data human readable.

 I would not want to walk far down the path of offering best practices about sharing media files as data. That way lies an ocean at 99 degrees C.
-Annette

On Mar 27, 2015, at 10:11 AM, Bernadette Farias Lóscio <bfl@cin.ufpe.br> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have one question for the group:
> 
> When we talk about publishing data on the Web, are we talking just about publishing sets of values (ex: strings, numbers...) or it also includes publishing audio, image, video and documents?
> 
> Kind regards,
> Bernadette
>

Received on Friday, 27 March 2015 18:41:21 UTC