Engagement Fund: Geo Open Data Publishing Best Practices in a Day (training) by Trevor Alcorn, Marine Institute

The Marine Institute hosted two “Geo Open Data Publishing Best Practices in a Day” training courses funded under the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform sponsored Open Data Engagement Fund at the Marine Institute offices in Galway (February 10^th 2017) and Dublin (February 21^st 2017).

Geo Open Data is Open Data that contains a geographic or location feature, reference or attribute; has an open licence; and can be accessed, used, adapted and shared subject only to attribution.

The Geo Open Data training day was divided into eight (8) sessions taking participants on a journey through Geo Open Data best practice recommendations identified by the W3C Data Web Best Practices (DWBP) working group including metadata, data licence, data quality, data identifiers, data formats and data enrichment.

Session plans for the day targeted aims and key learning outcomes around:

1. What is Geo Open Data?
2. What are the recommend W3C DWBP to consider when publishing Geo Open Data?
3. What are the metadata best practices to consider when publishing Geo Open Data on the web?
4. What are the Open Data Licence best practices to apply when publishing Geo Open Data?
5. The 5 Steps to Geo Open Data Quality?
6. How to design and create human readable Data Identifiers when publishing Geo Open Data?
7. What are the best Open Data Formats to consider publishing Geo Open Data in?
8. What are the best practices to implement the enrichment of Geo Open Data?

Both sessions were well attended with 17 participants in Galway and 15 participants in Dublin from a variety of agencies and public sector organisations including:

• Commissioners of Irish Lights
• Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment
• Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government
• Department of Public Expenditure and Reform
• Donegal County Council
• Dublin City Council
• Galway City Council
• Geological Survey
• Irish Aviation Authority
• Irish Water
• Limerick City and County Council
• Marine Institute
• Mayo County Council
• National Parks and Wildlife Service
• Office of Public Works
• Ordnance Survey Ireland
• Roscommon County Council
• Sligo County Council
• Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland
• Teagasc

Trevor Alcorn

GIS Analyst and Information Management Specialist, Marine Institute