Astun Technology Data Discoverability

Jo Cook

Background

Data Discoverability is the new cool thing in government

Best Practice

Geospatial Commission Best Practice Guides state that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)

Recommendations

Data sharing is good (obvs) but most searches come from search engines, not direct searches in portals

To help people find things we need to treat data and metadata as web content and employ search-engine optimisation (SEO) techniques

We need to use structured data to help search engines provide a richer view of our content

SEO is about making sure search engines display our content as high up in search results as possible

We do this by ensuring that we don't have any data quality issues that might cause down-ranking

Data quality reports in zeppelin analytics

Structured data is the fun part!

By mapping terms in our content to schema.org types we tell google what our page is about

which in turn helps it decide how to display the result

We can also use web analytics to provide insight on how people are using our data and our portals

providing insights into numbers of visitors, what data is being downloaded, where people are from, etc

Examples from Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure

Metadata in GeoNetwork/Structured Data/Google Dataset Search/Twitter Card Validator/Web Console

This is not limited to metadata

Structured data could be applied to lots of our products, like spotlight or other single-use maps

Web analytics could help us and customers understand how data and pages are being used

What's in it for us?

No one else seems to be doing it!

It's very topical

It adds value to our offering

It's a relatively quick win!

Thank You!