Layered Data: A Paper & Some Commentary

by Leigh Dodds

Two years ago I wrote a short paper about “layering” data but for various reasons never got round to putting it online. The paper tried to capture some of my thinking at the time about the opportunities and approaches for publishing and aggregating data on the web. I’ve finally got around to uploading it and you can read it here.

I’ve made a couple of minor tweaks in a few places but I think it stands up well, even given the recent pace of change around data publishing and re-use. I still think the abstraction that it describes is not only useful but necessary to take us forward on the next wave of data publishing.

Rather than edit the paper to bring it completely up to date with recent changes, I thought I’d publish it as is and then write some additional notes and commentary in this blog post.

You’re probably best off reading the paper, then coming back to the notes here. The illustration referenced in the paper is also now up on slideshare.

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