The person promoting data sharing in the organisation and the data administrator
The organisation's IT professionals
This section discusses what metadata is, why and how the organisation should describe the data to be opened, and where this descriptive data can be published. This type of descriptive data is also referred to as metadata.
Under the INSPIRE Directive, EU Member States have an obligation to prepare metadata for the spatial data sets and services covered by the Directive and publish them on a search service, which in Finland is the Paikkatietohakemisto.
Please note that the Data Governance Act obliges organisations to describe the datasets covered by the Act in the Suojattudata service.
Datasets usually have two types of metadata:
Describing the dataset will help both human and machine users to understand the data and thus facilitate its reuse. The metadata that describes the data contains information on, for example, the data’s origin, structure, and terms of use. Without this information, it would be impossible to use the data. When data is published on the Internet, its original context can easily be lost, which makes it particularly important to provide the user with metadata.
Example
If a dataset contains the number 37 without any explanatory metadata, it could refer to a variety of factors, such as indoor temperature, shoe size, seating position, or something else entirely. Only metadata will allow you to correctly understand the meaning of that number. In this case, the metadata should describe that the numbers in the dataset refer to indoor temperatures, and that the temperatures are indicated in Celsius.
While the Information Management Board has not published any recommendations on describing data that is to be opened, the metadata published in e.g. the Open Data service uses the EU countries’ common DCAT-AP 2.0 data model. The data.europa.eu portal assesses the metadata harvested for the service with the help of the FAIR principles.
The metadata should be available in both human and machine-readable formats. It is advisable for Finnish organisations to provide their metadata in Finnish, but also in Swedish and English whenever possible. In particular, metadata in English is useful for potential international data users. The datasets described in the Open Data service can be automatically found in the data.europa.eu service, which gathers European data together and thus gives international visibility to open data from different countries.
Organisations that have already opened their data have published metadata in connection with their datasets, either on a data portal (such as Open Data), on the organisation’s website, or both.
This section describes how and where you should publish a dataset that is to be opened.
Organisations that have already opened their data have usually published the datasets to be opened and their metadata in a public data portal, ensuring that the datasets can be found as easily and quickly as possible.
The FAIR principles were originally developed for research data. They are also applicable to open data publication, however, even though not all principles can necessarily be followed as such.
FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable.
Image: FAIR principles in brief.
By following these principles, you can ensure that your data can be easily reused and that your published data and its metadata are of a high quality.
Check that the open data you publish complies with the FAIR principles:
Read more about the FAIR principles and publishing open data (in Finnish).
It is advisable to make the datasets opened by central government actors visible on Open Data servide. This way, the data can reach a large number of people who are interested in using it.
There are several data portals for sharing your data:
Open Data service is as a national open data contact point, and the metadata for the datasets available on it is harvested by and published on the data.europa.eu service administered by the European Commission. Open Data service contains a large volume of metadata for datasets published in other Finnish data portals – among other things, data are harvested from Helsinki Region Infoshare service and Paikkatietohakemisto.
In addition to publishing the metadata for its dataset in a data portal, the organisation may also publish the data on its website.
This section describes how and where you should communicate about the data you intend to share. Communication is one way of improving the discoverability of data, which is why you should spread your message across a range of communication channels.
It is advisable for an organisation to market the datasets it has opened using different communication methods, to encourage the widespread use of its data. Below is a list of good practices for communicating about your opened data.
You should also encourage the users of your datasets to describe the applications or services they have developed on the basis of your open data. You can highlight the best examples of these applications on e.g. your social media feed, to inspire other application developers and data users.
You can inform people about your opened data in various places, such as
You can also present your data to your organisation’s networks and encourage its use by organising various events around its uses.
It is worth remembering that these communication activities can be carried out by several parties at a time. In the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, for example, both the party opening the data and the HRI service communicate about all newly opened datasets.
Read more about open data-related communications in the Open Data Handbook.
This section contains support material related to the topics discussed in this step.
Training courses on the data.europa.eu website: