How We Add Value to Public Data With Better Curation And Documentation?

In this example, we show a simple indicator: the Government Budget Allocations for R&D in Environment in many European countries. (In our Digital Music Observatory we give a more relevant example about the turnover of the radio industry in Europe.)

This dataset comes from a public datasource, the data warehouse of the European statistical agency, Eurostat. Yet it is not trivial to use: unless you are familiar with the nomenclature for the analysis and comparison of scientific programmes and budgets or the Frascati Manual, you will probably not find this dataset on the Eurostat website.

Our version of this statistical indicator is documented following the FAIR principles: our data assets are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. While the Eurostat data warehouse partly fulfills these important data quality expectations, we can improve them significantly. And we can also improve the dataset, too, as we will show in the next blogpost.

Findable Data

Our data observatories add value by curating the data–we bring this indicator to light with a more descriptive name, and we place it in context with our Green Deal Data Observatory. While many people may need this dataset in the environmental policy organizations, NGOs, scientific journalists, or researchers, most of them has no training in the nomenclatures of scientific and R&D spending or public budget accounts. Our curated data observatories bring together many available data around important domains. Our Green Deal Data Observatory, for example, aims to form an ecosystem of climate policy and climate change mitigation data users and producers.

We added descriptive metadata that help you find our data and match it with other relevant data sources. For example, we add keywords and standardized metadata identifiers from the Library of Congress Linked Data Services, probably the world’s largest standardized knowledge library description. This makes sure that you can find relevant data about the same concept (environmental protection) besides our turnover data. This help unambigously connect our dataset with other information source that use the same concept, but maybe different keywords, such as Protection of environment, or maybe Umweltschutz in German, or Ochrana životného prostredia in Slovak. Or avoid confusion with Human environment.

Accessible Data

Our data is accessible in two forms: in csv tabular format (which can be read with Excel, OpenOffice, Numbers, SPSS and many similar spreadsheet or statistical applications) and in JSON for automated importing into your databases. We can also provide our users with SQLite databases, which are fully functional, single user relational databases.

Tidy datasets are easy to manipulate, model and visualize, and have a specific structure: each variable is a column, each observation is a row, and each type of observational unit is a table. This makes the data easier to clean, and far more easier to use in a much wider range of applications than the original data we used. In theory, this is a simple objective, yet we find that even governmental statistical agencies–and even scientific publications–often publish untidy data. This poses a significant problem that implies productivity loses: tidying data will require long hours of investment, and if a reproducible workflow is not used, data integrity can also be compromised: chances are that the process of tidying will overwrite, delete, or omit a data or a label.

While the original data source, the Eurostat data warehouse is accessible, too, we added value with bringing the data into a tidy format. Tidy data can immediately be imported into a statistical application like SPSS or STATA, or into your own database. It is immediately available for plotting in Excel, OpenOffice or Numbers.

Interoperability

Our data can be easily imported with, or joined with data from other internal or external sources.

All our indicators come with standardized descriptive metadata, following two important standards, the Dublin Core and DataCite–implementing not only the mandatory, but the recommended descriptions, too. This will make it far easier to connect the data with other data sources, e.g. turnover with the number of radio broadcasting enterprises or radio stations within specific territories.

Our passion for documentation standards and best practices goes much further: our data uses Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange standardized codebooks, unit descriptions and other statistical and administrative metadata.

Reuse

All our datasets come with standardized information about reusabililty. We add citation, attribution data, and licensing terms. Most of our datasets can be used without commercial restriction after acknowledging the source, but we sometimes work with less permissible data licenses.

In the case presented here, we added further value to encourage re-use. In addition to tidying, we significantly increased the usability of public data by handling missing cases. This is the subject of our next blogpost.

Are you a data user? Give us some feedback! Shall we do some further automatic data enhancements with our datasets? Document with different metadata? Link more information for business, policy, or academic use? Please give us any feedback!