The approach that should be taken to releasing data should reflect the progression from taking the first step of publishing data in whatever form to the goal of providing linked data. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, has outlines five stages of publishing public data:
The approach that should be taken to releasing data should reflect the progression from taking the first step of publishing data in whatever form to the goal of providing linked data:
- * - publish the available data on the Web in whatever format
- ** - make it available as structured data, for example in a spreadsheet rather than a PDF document
- *** - publish it in a non-proprietary format such as comma separated values (CSV)
- **** - user URLs to identify items so that people can 'point' to them
- ***** - link the data to other data to provide context.
The best must not become the enemy of the good – progress should be made to the next stage towards linked data at the earliest opportunity, as each step in this progression represents an improvement on the previous one. The ultimate ambition is the publication of linked data.
Stage ** should be a reasonable starting position, reflecting the principle that data should be published in machine-readable, re-usable format. However, any difficulty in achieving stage ** is not a reason to delay or not to do stage *.
