Preserve Endangered Data on data.world
A few days ago, an alleged alert on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website stated the site would be shutting down April 28. Though the EPA called the allegations mere rumors, and assured the public that the site and data are not going anywhere, other sources like @altUSEPA have stated that there is an administrative interest in axing the site.
Whether true or not, there is no denying that these are exceptional times. Think of the Marches for Science that spanned the country just last week, and ongoing data preservation efforts from organizations like DataRefuge.
In these turbulent times, data.world maintains its longstanding commitment and passion for preserving open data.
Since data.world opened its doors to the world, federal and local open data has been a top priority (read about our year-long project with the U.S. Census here). If you search for EPA or environmental data on data.world, or even “government”, the results will reflect sustained efforts to preserve data and aid in its continued distribution. More importantly, many of these datasets were added not by data.world, but by individuals in the data.world community who, like you, care about preserving this data.
As a Public Benefit Corporation, data.world’s mission is to:
- strive to build the most meaningful, collaborative and abundant data resource in the world in order to maximize data’s societal problem-solving utility,
- advocate publicly for improving the adoption, usability, and proliferation of open data and linked data, and
- serve as an accessible historical repository of the world’s data.
data.world aims to be a data resource that facilitates motivated data communities in contributing to the open data cause. It has partnered with Data for Democracy since D4D’s inception, not only because D4D’s mission was inspiring, but because data.world found that the platform it was building could help further that mission. Both data.world and D4D believe in citizen empowerment and believe in maximizing the utility of data in solving societal problems.
Since the transition to the new Trump administration earlier this year, there has been major public concern surrounding the preservation of government data, to ensure that it is archived for later use, in case it is ever removed from government websites. In response to this need, Data for Democracy launched a data.gov archive project, mobilizing the community of volunteers to preserve data from data.gov. Now a team of over 80 individuals, the data.gov archive project has partnered with data.world to build out open data catalogues from data.gov. This repository currently holds over 73,000 unique datasets from data.gov, and the group continues to remain vigilant regarding opportunities to preserve additional data.
I invite you to take your fears and remind yourself that you are an empowered citizen. If you are not a member already, please consider joining data.world to find data and to share datasets you want to save for future generations and for future collaborations.
