Best Practices in describing and defining dataset quality information and making it FAIR

Mr.  Harko  Werkman¹, Dr. Robin Burgess², Dr Mingfang Wu³, Dr.  Lesley Wyborn⁴

¹University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia, ²Australian Research Data Commons, Sydney, Australia, ³Australian Research Data Commons, Melbourne, Australia, ⁴Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Situation:

Research communities are increasingly recognising the need to define and document dataset quality to assist in reuse and transparency of datasets from both a disciplinary and a repository perspective. Dataset quality information is context specific and there is no one size that fits all data types and disciplines: hence, community-agreed specifications vary widely across and within disciplines. There is little agreement from repositories on how to provide dataset quality information for their assets. This BoF session aims to start the conversation on best practices on when, and how, to develop dataset quality information and make it FAIR.

Action:

Several International Data Quality communities worked together and produced the “Global Community Guidelines for Documenting, Sharing, and Reusing Quality Information of Individual Digital Datasets”. These guidelines could be documented in Data Management Plans including data quality definitions/specifications and methodologies to be used for assessing and evaluating quality. Reports on quality assessments of individual datasets persistently attached to datasets would be automatically accessible from the repository.

This BoF will report on these International activities, followed by discussion amongst participants on Australasian issues such as:

• What standards/vocabularies are available to describe/rate dataset quality attribute(s)/dimension(s)/assessment method in your discipline?
• How to include collection of data quality information in data management plans and at what granularity?

Result:

The Australian/New Zealand Data Quality Interest Group will then continue the discussion from this BoF on best disciplinary practices, and collaborate with international data quality communities for working on solutions.

Session agenda and notes

Biography:

Mr. Harko Werkman, Reserach Outputs Officer, University of Tasmania

Dr. Robin Burgess, Research Data Specialist, ARDC

Dr. Mingfang Wu, Research Data Specialist, ARDC

Dr. Lesley Wyborn, Adjunct Fellow, ANU