W3C Questionnaire and TPAC session on Practices and Tooling for Web Data Standardization

The World Wide Web Consortium <https://www.w3.org/> together with the Open Data Institute <https://theodi.org/> are conducting a study of practices and tooling for Web data standardisation, with financial support from Innovate UK’s <https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/innovate-uk/about> Emerging and Enabling Technologies programme. We want to get a better understanding of what kinds of standards people are interested in, and to make it easier to develop data standards at W3C for use on the Web. We very much thank you for the time and effort you take for completing this questionnaire. Your knowledge and expertise is very much appreciated.

Open data is data that anyone can access, use or share. When big companies or governments release non-personal data, it enables small businesses, citizens and researchers to develop resources which make crucial improvements to their communities. According to McKinsey, a global market powered by open data from across seven sectors would create between $3tn and $5tn a year. Open standards are key to enabling markets of data and services based upon open data. Further details are provided on the Open Data Institute page on what is open data <https://theodi.org/what-is-open-data>.

In some cases, access to data is restricted by agreements between providers and consumers of data and services, possibly involving some form of remuneration along with terms and conditions. Open markets for such cases are facilitated by open standards for data. These standards can cover data formats and data models as a well as other metadata, protocols and APIs. Some related topics include what standards are needed to support discovery, and whether data is available as datasets for download, or for access via network APIs. Other topics relate to standards for describing data in terms of shared vocabularies, e.g. units of measure, support for internationalization, and whether the vocabularies are stable or are expected to track rapidly evolving needs.

This questionnaire is open to anyone interested in Web data standardisation, whether you were previously or currently involved in standards group, or have an interest in contributing to future standards. We plan to make the results of this study public, but will not quote or attribute answers without your permission. We may contact you to ask follow up questions based upon the information you have provided. We will provide anonymity in respect to who contributed to this study, except when you agree for us to either quote you or seek testimonials from you. We will not share your contact details without your permission.

The questionnaire is available at: https://goo.gl/forms/qiQ5smQ7U1qTl0fp1 <https://goo.gl/forms/qiQ5smQ7U1qTl0fp1>

It would be very much appreciated if you can respond to the questionnaire by late November 2017. If you have any questions about the study and this questionnaire, please contact Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org <mailto:dsr@w3.org>>, W3C Data Activity Lead.

Finally, for those of you that will be at TPAC 2017, I invite you to attend the break-out session on Web data standarisation that I am organising for Wednesday afternoon, see:

    https://www.w3.org/wiki/TPAC/2017/SessionIdeas#Web_Data_Standardization <https://www.w3.org/wiki/TPAC/2017/SessionIdeas#Web_Data_Standardization>

Many thanks,

Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
W3C champion for the Web of things & W3C Data Activity Lead