punkish: Data Apps

# Data Apps
## the way to share

Department of GeoScience, University of Göttingen • October 2016

Puneet Kishor (Plazi)

Released under a [CC0 Public Domain Dedication](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).

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## Help

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## In the beginning, there was a scientist working on her data on her computer with the help of an app on her computer.

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## Then she made a web app, and other scientists could see her data,  but only what she made available and the way she made it available.

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## So, she made a data app that published her data. And, she became a client for her data app and made a web app.

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## Now, others could not only see her data through her web app, they could also see her data app. They liked this idea, and did the same.

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## Others liked the idea and joined the party. Some made only web apps, others made only data apps, while yet others made both, and even more only used them.

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## They continued to work the way they always did, without changing their tools and technology. No one placed any demands on another, no one’s burden was increased.

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## The only tacit agreement was that they all agreed to adhere to very minimum and easy standards for building data apps because they recognized the benefit of doing so.

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## So, how does this all work? A desire to make one’s data accessible by others, and a common understanding to follow a few very lightweight standards.

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## Every one is free to continue to use what they are already using. No one has to change their mode of work or their favorite technology.

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## We depend on Representational State Transfer (REST) as the architectural style and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as data transport format.

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## No one is obligated to provide their data to anyone, and no one is beholden to anyone. The only concession is to adhere to a common interface.

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## When a user finds some one else’s  data useful, the two form a relationship.

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## If the other user finds use for the first user’s data, well, that is even better as the relationship is symbiotic.

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## Given a large number of users participating in this way of opening up their data, everyone will benefit from someone’s work.

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## But, it will be even better if the data publisher could keep count of how many users took the data.

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## Since access to the data, be it via the web or through the command line, is exclusively via a web server, the publisher always knows the use count.

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## With no middleman, it is easy to track when B uses A’s data as B leaves information in A’s logs.

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## But, what would happen if C takes A’s data from B? That is a difficult problem worth solving. No answer yet, but more on that soon.

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## A complementary issue is for the user to know what can be done with the data.

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## What can be done with the data is usually driven by what the data publisher permits.

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## Most scientific data may already be in the public domain. Yet, it is a good practice to publish the data with a data license accompanying all data packets.

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### Make your data available.

### Always serve your data via a web server.

### Always create a data app first.

### Build other apps on top of the data apps.

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### Your data is a resource.

### Make your resource identifiable by a unique name.

### This is the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).

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## Cool URIs don’t change. This is your contract to your community.

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## Because each scientist speaks a different language, we need a common interface to connect everyone.

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## Our common interface is the hypertext transfer protocol (http) and its limited set of verbs such as GET, PUT, DELETE, POST.

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## Our data transfer format of choice is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), *where possible*.

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### You and others can do more with raw data than with cooked data.

### Think data apps that publish raw data. (raw up to the level it makes sense)

### Each datum is a resource.

### Each resource has a unique name.

### And, is accessible by a canonical URI.

### Choose JSON (or other format) for data transfer.

### Provide a few standard resources for discovery

- author
- version
- license
- resources