Where to Publish?

While the easy answer to this is ‘on the web,’ there are some key decisions that need to be made to make your data discoverable to your intended users. Depending on how closely engaged you are with your user group(s), you may be able to reach them directly to let them know about your data, or you may need to publish in a way that makes it easier for users who don’t know about your data to find it.

People generally use two types of search to find the data they need: they either go to a data portal that probably contains the data and search there; or they start on a regular web search engine, which sometimes returns results that are datasets.

If you are publishing a small number of datasets, the easiest way to do this is to save your data to a shareable drive such as Google Drive or Microsoft Sharepoint and share a link with your users.

If you want to make your data more findable, you will want to ensure your data is uploaded to a central data repository or portal.

It used to be that portals were largely driven by public sector data, and therefore were structured by government region or department. However, increasingly, may be that good platforms to reach your audience already exist, that are focused on the vertical or industry that aligns with your data.

Open Net Zero aims to make data about renewable energy available;

Stream is a platform for data about the water sector;

Data Mill North has a geographic focus on data about the North of England.

Depending on your target audience, you may want to publish to multiple open data portals / platforms.

If you are publishing a larger number of datasets, or supporting infrastructural development of open data in your industry, you may want to use an open data publishing platform such as CKAN.

Read: Data Publishing Platforms for indepth explanations about portals, CKAN and other aspects of data publishing platforms.