Appendix

This page provides several terms with their descriptions used in data publication.

Open data

Simply making data available - providing access - is often not enough to be allowed to reuse data. The data has to be available in a format and under a license that allows reuse.

A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike ([more info](http://okfn.org/opendata)).

All publications made in the Data Repository include a license that specifies what a data consumer can or can’t do with the data. By downloading data from the service, the user agrees to comply with these terms.

Data provenance

Data provenance is providing a historical record of the data and its origins. It refers to the process of tracing and recording the origins of data and its movement between databases ([more info](http://db.cis.upenn.edu/DL/fsttcs.pdf)).

EPIC PIDs

A unique and persistent code that is coupled to a digital object. With this code, the object can be identified even when the object is moved to a different location.

Digital object identifier (DOI)

The digital object identifier (DOI) is a unique and stable (or persistent) identifier that ensures that a digital object can be permanently found by any researcher, regardless of changes in the URL where the object is found. A central registry ensures that the user of a DOI will be referred to its current location ([DataCite](http://www.datacite.org)).

All objects stored in the Data Repository will automatically receive a DOI upon publishing. See also ‘Persistent identifiers’.

Certification

An archive holding the [CoreTrustSeal certification](http://www.coretrustseal.org) complies with requirements ensuring that in the future, research data can still be processed in a high-quality and reliable manner.

The Data Repository aims to be certified with this certification (on a to be determined level) to guarantee a researcher that its data publication is securely stored and remains accessible now and in the future.

Linked data

A term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information and knowledge on the Semantic Web using RDF. Linked data refers to data published on the web in such a way that it is machine-readable, that its meaning is explicitly defined, that it is linked to other external data sets, and that in turn it can be linked to from external data sets ( [more info](http://linkeddata.org)).