Engaging users

Comments

The users can be allowed to comment on datasets. When activated, an additional tab “Comments” will be displayed in the dataset page.

To activate this feature, you need to configure a Disqus account to associate with the portal. Disqus is an external comment management system. You will need to set your account shortname and public key in the Configure menu, in the Social networks & sharing section.

If you’re unsure about how to get your Disqus credentials, you can follow the detailed steps detailed in the page.

Encouraging reuses

One of the main goals of Open Data is to have your data reused, thus producing new analyses or new services. Listing these reuses on the related datasets’ pages will help promote both the reuse itself and your data.

You can access the configuration for reuses in the Configuration menu section, under Reuses.

Enabling the reuse feature on your portal will display a new Reuses section at the bottom of the information tab on each dataset page. Additionally, this section will provide a form through which users can submit their reuses and will list all approved reuses.

In order to be displayed on a dataset’s page, new reuses must be reviewed and approved by an administrator.

When the reuse feature is enabled, you can additionally allow anonymous users (users without an account) to submit reuses. This is recommended on Open Data portals or portals which do not allow external users to create an account.

Notifications

By default the portal will send a notification to the administrators for every reuse submission. You can add additional recipients email adresses in the form “New reuses notifications recipients”.

If you want to send these notifications only to one specific address, specify it in the form and check “Send notifications exclusively to these addresses”. For example if you want to send these notifications only to opendata@yourdomain.com :

Contact form recipients

Within the pages you create you can include a contact form that allows users to send a message to domain administrators. You can add recipients to these messages in the Social networks & sharing section, in the Configure menu.

Dataset subscriptions

Users on your portal can subscribe to any dataset they can access; by doing so, they opt-in to receive notifications that the dataset publisher can decide to send at any time, for example an information about a future schema change, or to indicate that the data has been updated recently.

Note

The button is only available to users who are logged on the portal using an account. If you want to use this feature on an open data portal for example, you may want to allow users to sign up on your portal.

As a dataset publisher, you can see the list of users subscribed to your dataset from its back-office configuration page, using the “Subscribers” tab which appears if you have at least one subscriber on the dataset. From there, you can also send a message to all the users who subscribed to this dataset.

It is advised to warn your subscribers in advance for any change that may impact any of their reuse, such as a change in the schema (renaming an existing field, removing a field) that may cause issues with existing reuses, or an update of the data itself, if it is not updated very frequently.

User feedback on datasets

Note

This feature is currently in beta, and is not available by default. Please contact us if you would like to try this feature on your own portal.

If you wish to gather feedback on the content of a specific dataset, you can activate “User feedback” from its back-office configuration page.

Once the option is active and the dataset is published again, your users will be able to send feedback on your dataset, either for a specific record, or to suggest a new record, by clicking on the little chat bubble in the table view.

Doing so will open a form where the user can write a message, and optionally suggest new values.

As the publisher of the dataset, you can access the list of all the feedback sent by your users. This is available in the “Feedback” tab of the back-office dataset page. From there, for each feedback sent, you can see the message, the suggested values, and you can archive it once you consider it handled.

Note

This is not a crowdsourcing feature; the suggestions are not automatically applied or added to the dataset. It is up to the dataset’s publisher to make sure the relevant feedback is applied to the source.