The ODI has published Collaborative practices with structured data: Do tools support what users need? a summary of a paper authored by Laura Koesten, Emilia Kacprzak, Jeni Tennison, Elena Simperl, which was presented at CHI’19.
The paper states that tools that help us work with data should support four high-level user needs:
- Documentation of data and its lifecycle
- Conversation
- Change control
- Custom data access
The Frictionless Data specification and associated patterns do a good job of addressing the first user need.
On reading the paper, a few things sprung to mind that perhaps should be added to the spec:
- contact details property to enable data re-users to contact the data publisher
- spatial and temporal coverage to help users understand the scope of the data #628
- url for a place where people can discuss or provide feedback on the data
- units of measure pattern to help people understand the values in a column of data (discussion, issue #216, WIP PR #607)
- refinements to the README.md recommendations
Have a read of the paper and share your thoughts on potential improvements.
