[okfn-labs] Data validation workflow management

[Jun Matsushita]

Dear list,

This is my first post, so any guidance on how to better interact with you is most welcome.

Tom Rees advised me to post my question to you. 

A few times in the past months, I have come to experience a sort of gap that appeared in a few very different contexts. The "abstracted" version would basically:
 - allow to submit evidence (anecdotal, scientifically grounded, crowdsourced, and most importantly a mix of these...) and,
 - allow to link these submitted evidences to particular structured claims/facts (such as when fact-checking different aspects/components of a particular claim) and,
 - allow to review/validate evidence through a range of different methodologies (peer-review, automatic ranking/rating systems, validation workflows,...). 

Another way to put this is that I started creating Google Spreadsheet which have 50+ collaborators and managing the collaboration on individual rows in impossible with versioning and crude permissions. 

As far as I know, this feature is sometimes included in existing products, but is not abstracted in a way that would allow to plugin different data store/collection components on the input side, and data visualisation/publication on the other side, in a way that is flexibly interface-able, configurable by non-techies and available in Open Source and Saas so that it can be widely adopted. I've been pointed toward Indaba (http://getindaba.org/) as an existing closed source approach to a subset of this.

My questions are :
 - Do you think this is an actual need in data collection and analysis projects? 
 - Have you seen this type of workflows being repeatedly implemented in different ways in different software products? 
 - Do you know of efforts to build an open source software project that would achieve part or whole of these features?

Tom mentioned that Open Government projects usually don't necessarily need this type of workflows but suggested maybe Open Science project do. I guess this type of verification workflows would be upstream of a platform like CKAN, although CKAN could provide extensions to have specific views relevant to datasets that are in perpetual validation.

Hope to hear about whether this makes sense to anyone else!

Best,

Jun
Jun Matsushita
Head of Innovation and Technology
MOBILE +44 7429 144 691 | SKYPE junjulien
jmatsushita at internews.eu
www.internews.eu


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