How can I contribute data?

You can contribute to the Data section by suggesting land-related datasets and indicators to the Land Portal team by using our contact form.

If you are unsure whether these datasets or indicators will be of relevance to the Land Portal, check if your collection corresponds to one or more of the Land Portal's themes or concepts.

 

What are the benefits of contributing to the Data section?

• Join an active community working on land issues at the global and local level
• Check constantly the quality of your data with the help of the Land Portal team and community
• Build robust set of metadata, allowing for a wider reuse of the data while always recognizing the original autorship.
• Increase the visibility and the accessibility of your work and attract new visitors for your site from the Land Portal
• Enable the reuse of your content through the Land Portal's Linked Open Data (LOD) interface

What is a dataset?

A dataset is a collection of data, published or curated by a single agent, and available for access or download in one or more formats (Excel, RDF, CSV...).

Currently, we are compiling datasets with data about indicators. The metadata that is is need by dataset is:

• Name
• Description
• ID
• Organization (author of the dataset)
• Related concepts and themes from the LandVoc

 

What is an indicator?

A (statistical) indicator is the representation of statistical data for a specified time, place or any other relevant characteristic, corrected for at least one dimension (usually size) so as to allow for meaningful comparisons.

The metadata that is is need by indicator is:

• Name
• Description
• ID
• Dataset related
• Max / min possible values
• High/Low (High means it is better to have a high value, low means the best value is the lowest one (like in rankings))
• Measurement unit
• Coded value (yes/no) (The values for this indicator is taken from some controlled term list (could be characters, colors, strings, numbers...))
• Related concepts and themes to topically classify the indicator.

What is an observation?

For each indicator, a single data point is as simple as: 

• Country (preferably ISO 3 code)
• Year (YYYY)
• Value​

For instance, the data for a generic indicator would look like this:

You can enrich the basic Country/Year/Value structure by adding also a field with specific Notes.

In our Github, you can find examples of spreadsheets that we use to process and import the data into the Land Portal:

• Main page
• FAO Land and Gender indicators
• OECD SIGI indicators

 

What are the steps to import new data?

After you have contacted us through the contact form, we will get back to you and in consultation with you, we will determine the most suitable way to include your dataset(s) and indicators in the Land Portal's Data section. 

Technically, the workflow for ingestion will follow the following steps:

1. Read / Understand the data.
2. Human pre-process of the data.
3. Run an transformation process to generate an RDF file from your data.
4. Upload the RDF generate in the Land Portal LOD triple storage (Virtuoso).