Dan Fowler and Rufus Pollock: Frictionless Data

Data-driven work is an ever-increasing part of research. At the same time, there is very significant friction around the acquisition, sharing and reuse of data. Based on working both with researchers and government for more than a decade on the issues surrounding data sharing and use, we have identified a specific subproblem which is both significant and tractable: the development and adoption of a lightweight specification and associated tooling for “packaging” (tabular) data and transporting it easily and efficiently from one tool, or one user, to another. The approach is titled “Data Package” because our work has close analogy with “containerization” in shipping and “packaging” in software.