[@OKau] "High value" datasets

Wed Apr 15 07:41:06 UTC 2015

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Cassie Findlay <findlay.cassie at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Has anyone come across good criteria or defined methods for identifying
> 'high value' datasets? If, for example, you are looking at a whole of
> government jurisdiction. I found some in this EU report
> <http://ec.europa.eu/isa/documents/publications/report-on-high-value-datasets-from-eu-institutions_en.pdf>
> but would like to gather some more.
>
> I realise that value is a highly subjective thing to assert (valuable for
> whom, why?) and really like Rosie's work on defining the problems first, in
> order to then work out where you might find datasets of value, but all that
> aside :) - are there examples out there of work to define high value stuff?
>

Other people have commented on other frameworks etc for assessing value,
but informally, I've found myself focusing on three criteria when pondering
priorities for government data release:

1. Uniqueness: to what extent are there no other sources of this
information? A council's collection of street information is valuable but
there's a lot of overlap with OpenStreetMap, for instance. But no one else
could have the garbage collection zone boundaries.
2. Maintenance. Datasets age pretty quickly, and a dataset that's more than
a year out of date seems to go downhill in value pretty fast.
3. Reusability: was the data being collected with a general purpose in
mind, or are there limitations due to the original purpose for which it was
collected (eg, lack of comprehensiveness, idiosyncratic groupings,
jurisdictional filtering...)

Steve
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