Exploring standards for co-operative data

[timgdavies]

In our initial discussions of data standards for sharing information on co-operatives, we've looked towards http://schema.org which provides a widely used vocabulary for describing organisations, events, products and services.

One approach to standardisation of co-ops data would be:

• Agree a common set-up schema.org properties to use in marking up websites and datasets;
• Agree on a common approach to identifiers (potentially building on the Co-ops UK identifier number for co-ops)

There is also work by TransforMap which may be very relevant to explore in terms of taxonomies and technology.

[timgdavies]

From an explore of Transformap, a few of the proposed OpenStreetMap tags at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/TransforMap#Self-description_of_a_community may be relevant to identifying co-operatives.

There are also proposed tags for describing organisation types such as mode_of_organisation:self_managed

[rufuspollock]

Unsurprisingly I'd vote for something very simple e.g. CSV based and perhaps using some of the (Tabular) Data Package work. This will make it very simple for coops to publish this data themselves. I also note you can add rich e.g. schema.org column typing if you want.

[matt-wallis]

With reference to @rgrp (at okfn.org), the tabular data package can be found at http://data.okfn.org/doc/tabular-data-package. I'm agnostic about the representation used, and am a big fan of CSV for many uses. We also want to be able to embed linked data in websites, where a different representation will be better suited. We've used JSON-LD, for example.

I think this issue is about the content rather than the representation. I'm about to take a look at http://purl.org/essglobal/wiki