Publishing Open Data with Cubes

Cubes and Slicer were built with Open Data or rather Open Analytical Data in mind.

Read more about Open Data:

• Open Data (Wikipedia)
• Defining Open Data (OKFN)
• What is Open Data (Open Data Handbook)

With Cubes you can have a server that provides raw detailed data (denormalized facts) and grouped and aggregated data (aggregates). It is possible to serve multiple datasets which might share properties (dimensions).

Serving Open Data

Just create a public Slicer server. To provide more metadata add a info.json file with the following contents:

• label – server’s name or label
• description – description of the served data
• copyright – copyright of the data, if any
• license – data license, such as Creative Commons, Public Domain or other
• maintainer – name of the data maintainer, might be in format Name Surname <namesurname@domain.org>
• contributors - list of contributors (if any)
• keywords – list of keywords that describe the data
• related – list of related or “friendly” Slicer servers with other open data
• visualizations – list of links to prepared visualisations of the server’s data

Create a info.json file:

{
    "description": "Some Open Data",
    "license": "Public Domain",
    "keywords": ["budget", "financial"],
}

Include info option in the slicer configuration:

[workspace]
info: info.json

Related Servers

For better open data discoverability you might add links to other servers:

Related slicers.

{
    "related": [
        {
            "label": "Slicer – Germany",
            "url": "http://slicer.somewhere.de",
        },
        {
            "label": "Slicer – Slovakia",
            "url": "http://slicer.somewhere.sk",
        }
    ]
}