Open Data Metrics – Southampton ECS Web Team

"A big problem with open data… …usage metrics. The problem of usage metrics came up with data.southampton.ac.uk, but is a far bigger concern for equipment.data.ac.uk as we need to be able to show an external funder that we’re having an impact. We conform to (some) good Linked Open Data principles, our URIs resolve (mostly) and our data can be downloaded as a big single file; no noodling with APIs is required. Local caches of the data dump However this means that 3rd parties can snapshot our entire database and use it on things like their internal Intranet. In fact we do this ourselves; our university Intranet, SUSSED, has a search box which searches a mash up of the open data list of equipment from from equipment.data.ac.uk and some additional (non-open) data we get from some strategic partners. The catch is that we’ve got no way to know what’s been searched for there, or how often, so we’re losing all that juicy business intelligence. This is going to be a sticking block in future. Organisations may decide that their statistics gathering is more important than being fully open so may require all searches via an API to try to discourage 3rd parties being able to search the whole dataset. That sucks, but I can see why a manager would make that decision ..."