Help text and tool tips - 1. Does the data exist?

Open Data Index
1

In the open data census each question has some associated text that is used on the submission page.

2018Ă—708 185 KB

When used as tool tips on the place and dataset pages, this text is very long and does not display well due to its length.

1392Ă—962 343 KB

1934Ă—1010 320 KB

I would like to propose shorter text for the nine questions. (I will do this as a set of nine topics, this being the first).

Question 1: Does the data exist?

Currently:

We are looking for government data from an official resource either issued directly by the government or by a third party representing the government. Note that data offered by companies, citizen initiatives or any non-governmental organisation are not valid for submission. This means that we are looking only for what is officially published by governments. In some cases, the government will give the right to publish the data to third parties and in such cases submissions linking to third party sites are valid. It must, however, be explicitly stated on the data site that it is commissioned by the government (if the data is to be found on a company domain or on a domain of a civil society organisation or initiative, check if the organization has an agreement with the government to be the official source).

Proposed:

Data must come from an official resource either issued directly by the government or by a third party representing the government. Data offered by companies, citizen initiatives or any non-governmental organisation are not valid for submission.

If the government has given the right to publish the data to third parties, a submission with a link a to third party site is allowed. The third-party site must explicitly state that the data has been commissioned by the government. Check if the organization has an agreement with the government to be the official source.

What do you think?

2

So, a shorter description is always good, but I don’t think that the tooltip should be the motivation for it.
@sam, just for your reference for the imprvoed UI/UX.

3

@Mor, Happy to strike a balance between clear explanations and usability.

Perhaps we need two values:

  • help text to support submissions
  • tool tip text to explain the icons

Or perhaps we just have to change the long tool tip text on the places and dataset pages…

968Ă—278 60.8 KB

…to the tool tip text used on the home page. Thoughts?

4

@Stephen - I agree that we need a different text for the tool tip, phareps just the question itself in both pages (Home and places, as it use to be in the 2013 Index).

@pwalsh - thoughts?

1 Like
5

Content wise, looks good to me.

6

There is an issue in both versions on the use of “government” which can have a narrow meaning. For data types like transport timetables the authoritative source is the operator, who in some countries (such as the UK) may be a private company, perhaps with a franchise or contract from the government. Transport timetables also have the property of sometimes being issued by municipalities (or private operators of each municipality’s buses). This may also apply to Postcodes in countries where the mail service has been privatised.

It might be better to say something like “Data must come from the official source or from an officially-authorised representative. Data offered in lieu of official data, such as from other companies, citizen initiatives or non-government organisations does not count.”

1 Like