I expected some comments to my Data Publishing Three-Step post last week but what I didn’t expect was a virtual pat on the head with an accompanying croon of "Who’s the clever boy, then? You are! Yes, you are!" in a reply post—I’d love to dance with you, but…— from Dorothea Salo.

The problem she identifies in her, politely phrased, complaint about my reductionist approach is this:

Aside from my friends the open scientists (and not even all of them, to be honest), practically all the data-producing researchers I know are firmly stuck on Step 1. Firmly stuck, not to say "immovably." As for Step 2… trust me, these folks are not data modellers. I sincerely doubt my own capacity to teach RDF to someone who approaches me asking, "Is it okay if I record my data in Excel?"

And I totally agree with her.   It would be great in an ideal world if data creators could take all three steps to publish in a linkable queryable form.  But as she identifies, many folk are not data modellers, and wouldn’t want to be.   The three steps I identified are there for motivated people to take as many, or as few, that are compatible with their work and motivations.   All anyone could ask is that they at least have an awareness that others may have sufficient interest and motivation to take their data through the next step.

Starting with getting your data out there, in any form (yes even Excel, if that is your tool of choice), is the foundation.   Without the data in a form that you, and others, could reuse, there is little point.

So expanding on my Step 1. description:

• Publish your data.
• Publish it in a way that others can use – in a known format from which you can easily extract the actual data elements (Excel, csv, etc.  not pdf, or word).
• Publish it with an explanation of what the data is, and where to get it.
• Publish it under simple unambiguous licensing terms, without ambiguous restrictions such as ‘non-commercial only’.
• If possible identify things in the data using well known identifiers – not ‘substance_1234′ where H₂SO₄ could be used, or location_abc where Paris, FR would do.
• If there is not a suitable well known identifier set, create your own but publish that as well.
• Be consistent, with yourself and others around you – don’t go reinventing wheels.
• Publish your data!

Whilst taking Dorothea’s point about the difficulty in just convincing some people of the merits in exposing their data, none of this is rocket science and doesn’t mention Linked Data, or offends her longtime RDF scepticism.

Get significant amounts of data out there, and hopefully others will be motivated enough to use it usefully to add value by linking it to other data – maybe that will help demonstrate the worth of steps 2 and 3.

Picture published on Flickr by paraflyer.