metadata

The lacking strategy to organize data and metadata in a multilingual Europe puts creators opens up the biggest cultural market of the world to American competition.

Public data sources are often plagued with missng values. Naively you may think that you can ignore them, but think twice: in most cases, missing data in a table is not missing information, but rather malformatted information which will destroy your beautiful visualization or stop your application from working. In this example we show how we increase the usable subset of a public dataset by 66.7%, rendering useful what would otherwise have been a deal-breaker in panel regressions or machine learning applications.

Many people ask if we can really add value to free data that can be downloaded from the Internet by anybody. Public data usually requires a lot of work to become really valuable. To start with, it is not always easy to find.

Sisyphus was punished by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. When was a file downloaded from the internet? What happened with it sense? Are their updates? Did the bibliographical reference was made for quotations? Missing values imputed? Currency translated? Who knows about it – who created a dataset, who contributed to it? Which is the final, checked, approved by a senior manager?

Adding metadata exponentially increases the value of data. Did somebody already adjust old data to conform to constantly changing geographic boundaries? What are some practical ways of combining satellite sensory data with my organization’s records? And do I have the right to do so? Metadata logs the history of data, providing instructions on how to reuse it, also setting the terms of use. We automate this labor-intensive process applying the FAIR data concept.

Uncut diamonds need to be cut, polished, and you have to make sure that they come from a legal source.

While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors. Weighing costs and benefits, there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. Preprint of our article with copyright researchers.