This is the second in a short series of posts in which I'm sharing my notes and thoughts on a variety of different approaches for assessing data infrastructure and data institutions. The first post in the series looked at The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. In this post I want to take a look at … Continue reading Assessing data infrastructure: the Digital Public Goods standard and registry
Category: The Commons
Assessing data infrastructure: the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
How do we create well-designed, trustworthy, sustainable data infrastructure and institutions? This is a question that I remain deeply interested in. Much of the freelance work I've been doing since leaving the ODI has been in that area. For example, I'm currently helping with a multi-year evaluation of an grant-funded data institution. I'm particularly interested … Continue reading Assessing data infrastructure: the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
How could watermarking AI help build trust?
I've been reading about different approaches to watermarking AI and the datasets used to train them. This seems to be an active area of research within the machine learning community. But, of the papers I've looked at so far, there hasn't been much discussion of how these techniques might be applied and what groundwork needs … Continue reading How could watermarking AI help build trust?
What is Swash and is it really changing data ownership?
This is another in a very occasional series of blog posts where I look at different data initiatives, institutions or infrastructure in order to understand a bit more about how they work. And then have opinions about them. Previously I wrote about Common Voice. This time I'm looking at Swash which describes itself as "reimagining … Continue reading What is Swash and is it really changing data ownership?
Why are we still building portals?
The Geospatial Commission have recently published some guidance on Designing Geospatial Data Portals. There's a useful overview in the accompanying blog post. It's good clear guidance that should help anyone building a data portal. It has tips for designing search interfaces, presenting results and dataset metadata. There's very little advice that is specifically relevant to … Continue reading Why are we still building portals?
24 different tabular formats for half-hourly energy data
A couple of months ago I wrote a post that provided some background on the data we use in Energy Sparks. The largest data source comes from gas and electricity meters (consumption) and solar panels (generation). While we're integrating with APIs that allow us to access data from smart meters, for the foreseeable future most … Continue reading 24 different tabular formats for half-hourly energy data
Schema explorers and how they can help guide adoption of common standards
Despite being very different projects Wikidata and OpenStreetmap have a number of similarities. Recurring patterns in how they organise and support the work of their communities. We documented a number of these patterns in the ODI Collaborative Maintenance Guidebook. There were also a number we didn't get time to write-up. A further pattern which I … Continue reading Schema explorers and how they can help guide adoption of common standards
Building data validators
This is a post about building tools to validate data. I wanted to share a few reflections based on helping to design and build a few different public and private tools, as well as my experience as a user. I like using data validators to check my homework. I've been using a few different recently … Continue reading Building data validators
Some lessons learned from building standards around Schema.org
OpenActive is a community-led initiative in the sport and physical activity sector in England. It's goal is to help to get people healthier and more active by making its easier for people to find information about activities and events happening in their area. Publishing open data about opportunities to be active is a key part … Continue reading Some lessons learned from building standards around Schema.org
The UK Smart Meter Data Ecosystem
Disclaimer: this blog post is about my understanding of the UK's smart meter data ecosystem and contains some opinions about how it might evolve. These do not in any way reflect those of Energy Sparks of which I am a trustee. This blog post is an introduction to the UK's smart meter data ecosystem. It … Continue reading The UK Smart Meter Data Ecosystem