At YDS’ Help Desk you can view Q&A, exchange ideas and cooperate with developers and YourDataStories community representatives.

 

Q: What can I do to improve the quality of my data and ensure its accessibility and interoperability?
A:

To improve the quality of your data and make it more accessible to the public always consider the following 10 principles:

  1. Completeness. Does your data fully reflect what is recorded about a particular subject? To the extent that personally identifiable information is not compromised, the detail and scope of available information should be as great as possible.
  2. Primacy. Information held by the government should be primary source data, accompanied by annotations explaining how it was collected and recorded.
  3. Timeliness. Whenever possible, collected data should be released as quickly as possible. It is worth noting that real-time updates have the greatest potential to maximize the utility that the public can obtain from having access to the available information.
  4. Ease of physical and electronic access. Are there any barriers that may restrict access to data? We believe that government information should be widely accessible, and that access to it should not be hampered by either physical or electronic barriers. An example of a physical barrier can be the need to visit a particular location in person to obtain access to specific information, while online request forms and such browser-oriented technologies as Flash, Javascript or cookies are all examples of barriers that people can face when trying to access information online.
  5. Machine readability. Certain information can only be stored in the portable data format (PDF), but where possible data should be published in formats that lend themselves to machine processing.
  6. Non-discrimination. Anyone wishing to access government data should be able to do so without having to identify himself/herself, and without providing any justification for that matter.
  7. Use of commonly owned standards. Although some formats like XLS or CSV can make Open Data easy to work with, it has to be borne in mind that they can also have a ristricting effect on access. Consider Excel. Although a widely used spreadsheet program that makes it easy to store and organise tabulated data, is not free, which makes access to information stored in Excel format contingent on one's ownership of the programme. Ideally, governments should publish their data in formats that do not require end users to own or have access to licensed software.
  8. Licensing. Are there any restrictions on how the data can be used after the release? Imposing restrictions on dissemination is in itself a barrier to public use of data. Publishing your data under CC licence can ensure maximum openness, thus allowing it to have the greatest impact on the wider community.
  9. Permanence. Government information that has been released online should remain in online archives in perpetuity. Permanence is an important feature of Open Data, and one which can be bolstered by the provision of appropriate version-tracking and archiving information on ad hoc basis.
  10. Costs. It goes without saying that Open Data should be free at the point of access, not least because imposing user fees will ultimately reduce the pool of people able to access it.

Source: http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/ten-open-data-principles/ 

Q: Will it work in all popular web browsers?
A:

The generated apps should work in all recent browsers that support HTML5. Additional effort has also been made to support older versions.

And of course, it is designed to work in all mobile browsers !

Q: What is the technology used?
A:

We employ various technologies and programming languages to perform the technical tasks of YDS.

You can see a complete list at our Developers Page