Data management planning

In the following sections we provide resources for helping you manage data more effectively. There are the same resources and processes we use to manage this project.

DMPonline

DMPonline is a data management planning guide hosted by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) at https://dmptool.org/. It has built-in federated login for many major institutions, thus reducing the likelihood that you will need to generate a separate username and password to login if you work with one of these institutions. This guide steps you through questions you should be asking yourself about your data and provides a downloadable guide based on the answers you provide to the questions.

Formatting data

For our project we will be using text-based files for disseminating most of our data. The encoding we want to enforce in these files is UTF-8, which is backwards-compatibility with ASCII and the most common Unicode format. Scripts and programs should not fail due to encoding problems if we are providing data encoded using UTF-8. We process our data through UTF-8 encoding functions and validators to ensure this encoding. Informing users about your data encoding enhances trust in and accessibility to your data.

Metadata

Metadata is information that describes a set of data. Data repositories generally define metadata as a small overview subset of descriptive information for a set of data, and do not support more detailed descriptive metadata for working with the data. We dig deeper and present a much richer set of metadata, described under the README.json section of this guide.

Schemas and validation

If you follow the links to schemas and validation you will learn how these processes relate to our README.json file.