Sharing Data: A Guide

I often wrangle data

"In order to ensure that the Federal Government is taking full advantage of its information resources, executive departments and agencies...must manage information as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote openness and interoperability, and properly safeguard systems and information. Managing government information...will increase operational efficiencies, reduce costs, improve services, support mission needs, safeguard personal information, and increase public access to valuable government information."
- Executive Office of the President, 2013

Why give this talk?

What's data?

Machine-readable structured information

Sharing

Public

Private

Internal

3NF

Consistent data types

• \N
• null
• 0
• ""
• Unknown

How to fix: Consistency

Does it make sense to you?

How to fix: Colleagues

Spatial considerations

Your users' needs
!=
your needs

Just Say No
(to projections)

Projections "...are great if a printer is how you share data" - Calvin Metcalf

How to fix: WGS84 (4326)

Proprietary file formats

• Personal geodatabase
• Layer file (lyr)
• MXD (mxd)
• Shapefile (shp)
• File geodatabase (gbd)
• GeoJSON (geojson)
• Comma Separated Values (csv)

Coordinate precision

How to fix:

• ogr2ogr
• geojson-precision
• Excel/LibreOffice/OpenOffice

Other Considerations

License!

How to fix: CC license picker

Advertise

How to fix: provide links

Datasets shouldn't be ❄️

How to fix: be detailed and general

Metadata

How to fix: README

Be proud of your clean, interoperable data!

Thanks!