As the scale of data published on data.gov.uk increases, publishers often need to manage hundreds of datasets. As a result of this we've gradually added different reports to help them stay abreast. And of course these are all open to the public too. We've just added a sixth report - dataset comments - so though we'd take this opportunity to highlight them all.
The publisher reports are listed on the publisher page (e.g. Cabinet Office) under the 'Reports & Analytics' icon:
Firstly, let's check out the 'Comments', since that's a new report:
The report gives you a flavour of the comments, how much discussion there is going on amongst the community and the responsiveness of officials.
In addition we are trialling a feature where you can subscribe to comments and updates of a dataset (or app etc.). If you log-in, the options appear on a dataset at the bottom-right, before any comments:
The Broken links report shows data that has become unavailable, what the problem is, how long it's been a problem and allows comparison of 'brokenness rates' between the publishers:
It's particularly helpful for when content moves - in recent years hundreds of sites have been moved, rewritten or archived, with projects such as central government's move to gov.uk, the 'bonfire of the quangos' and the reorganization of the NHS.
The Openness report focuses on how far along the scale a publisher's data is: from open access & open licence for 1 star, open format for 3 stars or full linked-data for 5 stars.
At a glance we can see some datasets that only link to a webpage, rather than providing the actual download links, which means the data is not machine-accessible. However more positively, this publisher does have a reasonable number of 3 star datasets too (open access, open licence and open format). Again with this report you can see a rank of the publishers, to encourage a little competitive spirit of improvement!
The Data Publication Commitments pages are an attempt to collect the datasets that the central government departments are required to publish, according to various cross-government commitments:
The Usage page shows the user clicks on datasets (analytics) over time:
It's useful to know when there are spikes of interest in particular datasets, which ones are popular, and it provides a metric to help justify releasing data.
And finally, the Activity report provides a summary of the datasets created and updated, for this quarter and previous one:
This is used for internal reporting purposes, but it gives everyone an idea of what is being updated and what is new from a publisher.
So those are the publisher reports - most of them are downloadable as CSV and JSON.
And of course if the report you want isn't provided, do suggest it in the comments, or you can download the data.gov.uk catalogue as JSON or CSV and do your own analysis!
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