Licenses and download formats

[Chris Gorgolewski]

Dear Data Providers,

We are proud to announce that we have improved handling of license and download format information. Those two pieces of metadata help users decide if a given dataset matches their needs. Here are the latest changes:

• Licenses: We now recognize most commonly used licenses and harmonize their presentation in search results. If the dataset you are describing uses a common license, all you need to do is provide a  URL pointing to the license. For example (in JSON-LD):
  
  license: "https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/"
  
  Please include a URL to specific version (1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc.) of the license to make the link unambiguous. Here’s an example of a dataset where we harmonized the presentation of license information.
  
  
• Download formats: In alignment with the schema.org standard we now support MIME types as a value of the encodingFormat field. This means you can specify:
  
  encodingFormat: "text/csv"
  
  inside the DataDownload object (more details here). We support all of the MIME types curated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

We hope these improvements will help you make the datasets you describe easier to find. If your repository does not provide a license or download format information we strongly encourage you to add this metadata.

Best regards,
Team Dataset Search