The goal of making your data available is that other people can reuse it. A number of factors can prevent anybody from ever exploiting your data. This article reviews some of these factors and suggests some low effort ways you can increase the chances of your data's being used by others.

The development of the National Research Equipment Portal, equipment.data, was funded by EPSRC (Jisc from April 2015) in response to the need to improve visibility and utilisation of UK research equipment. The aim of equipment.data was to deliver a sustainable solution for the aggregation and displaying of published research equipment data from across UK HE in order to promote greater conversation around the utilisation of existing research infrastructure. Its development has the backing of RCUK as its preferred medium for national equipment data sharing with the service now endorsed as strategically significant by HEFCE.

The importance of open data and the benefits it can offer have received recognition on the international stage with the signing of the G8 Open Data Charter in June 2013. The charter has an early focus on 14 high value areas, including transport and education, where governments have greater influence. In the UK, we have seen the funding of the Open Data Institute (ODI) with a remit to support small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in identifying benefits from using open data, whereas, within HE, open data discussion is in its infancy although is acknowledged as a sector challenge by the Russell Group of universities. There is an evident need for the academic community to influence the adoption of applications using linked open data techniques in data management and service delivery. This article introduces the concept of data autodiscovery, highlighting the role of the Organisation Profile Document (OPD) and its contribution to the early success of the UK National Equipment Portal, equipment.data, along with discussing the need for greater dialogue in linked and open data standards development.

Real-time passenger information systems for bus users are now common place with bus stops in major UK cities equipped with arrival countdown displays and several apps now providing similar information direct to the Smartphone. Real-time displays at stops are expensive to install and given the current rate of smartphone take up, there could be benefits from using Quick Response (QR) codes linking to adapted, mobile friendly, webpages displaying arrival times of buses. This paper reports on a QR code implementation trial on 44 bus stops in six distinct areas of Southampton, UK. Each bus stop was fitted with a poster containing a unique QR code, linking to a website giving live bus arrival information taken from the Southampton traffic control centre. Two types of poster were developed (simplistic with minimal text and a more comprehensive one) to understand what level of instruction was necessary for QR code use. The number of hits at each stop were monitored via the website and surveys of users were undertaken through an on-line questionnaire (accessed via the QR code) and face-to-face interviews. The results suggested that there was very little variation in use of QR codes at stops by day of the week or between peak and inter-peak times but there were variations by geographical area. QR code use improved wait time acceptability and feelings of safety and well-being with the vast majority of users finding the system easy to use

Real-time passenger information systems for bus users are now common place with bus stops in major UK cities equipped with arrival countdown displays and several apps now providing similar information direct to the Smartphone. Real-time displays at stops are expensive to install and given the current rate of Smartphone take-up, there could be benefits from using Quick Response (QR) codes linking to adapted, mobile friendly, webpages displaying arrival times of buses. This paper reports on a QR code implementation trial on 44 bus stops in six distinct areas of Southampton, UK.Each bus stop was fitted with a poster containing a unique QR code, linking to a website giving live bus arrival information taken from the Southampton traffic control centre. Two types of poster were developed (simplistic with minimal text, and a more comprehensive one) to understand what level of instruction was necessary for QR code use. The number of hits at each stop were monitored via the website and surveys of users through an on-line questionnaire (accessed via the QR code) and face-to-face interviews.The results suggested that there was very little variation in the use of QR codes at stops by day of the week or between peak and inter-peak times but there were variations by geographical area. QR code use improved wait time acceptability and feelings of safety and well-being with the vast majority of users finding the system easy to use. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In the open world of the (Semantic) web, a world where increasingly diverse materials from disparate sources of different qualities are being made available, an automatic mechanism for the provision of provenance information of these sources is needed. This paper describes voidp, a provenance extension for the void vocabulary, that allows data publishers to specify the provenance relationships of their data. We enumerate voidp's classes and properties, and describe a use case scenario. A wider uptake of voidp by dataset publishers will allow data consuming tools to take advantage of these metadata providing consumers with the origin, i.e., the provenance, of what is being consumed.

Slides from the afternoon tutorial session at the The Open Revolution and the Web of Linked Data event organised by the Digital Economy Group at the University of Southampton.

Society has widely adopted use of electronic data without sufficient attention to the problems of non-repudiation (NR). A universal, transparent scheme is needed to replace the traditional paper-based model that people are familiar with. A registration scheme is proposed that uses a network of registration servers run in a way that is robust to legal and technical challenge. Any user can register potential electronic evidence with one or more of these servers. This enables a user to later assert that they had the data at the time. Wide availability should induce proper behaviour between parties whether they use the scheme or not.

Recent developments at the UK National Crystallography Service (NCS), in collaboration with the CombeChem eScience testbed and the eBank-UK projects, have been aimed at developing an eScience infrastructure to facilitate the crystallographic experiment from end to end. A seamless distributed computing approach is shown to be able to transform a conventional but high throughput service, to enable access and secure remote operation with the visualisation of the diffraction experiment, through the data workup and analysis to the dissemination and further use of the resulting structural data. Access to use the NCS facilities and expertise and a mechanism to submit samples is granted through a secure Grid infrastructure. The user may then monitor and steer the data collection aspects of their experiments and results data staged to a securely accessible location. Publication of ALL the results data generated during the course of the experiment is then enabled by means of an Open Access Data Repository. This repository publicises its content through Open Archive Initiative (OAI) protocols, which enable harvester and aggregator services to make the data searchable and accessible via data portals.