The stages through which information passes, typically characterized as creation or collection, processing, dissemination, use, storage, and disposition.

Source: US OD

IARs are registers specifically set up to capture and organise meta-data about the vast quantities of information held by government departments and agencies. A comprehensive IAR includes databases, old sets of files, recent electronic files, collections of statistics, research and so forth.

A structured collection of data presented in a form that people can understand and process. Information is converted into knowledge when it is contextualised with the rest of a person’s knowledge and world model. Source: ODH.

The name of an object or concept in a database. An identifier may be the object’s actual name (e.g. ‘London’ or ‘W1 1AA’, a London postcode), or a word describing the concept (‘population’), or an arbitrary identifier such as ‘XY123’ that makes sense only in the context of the particular dataset. Careful choice of identifiers using relevant standards can facilitate data integration.

The minimum set of metadata elements, the so-called IMMC core metadata, that is to be used in the data exchange.  IMMC Core Metadata, within the context of the Interinstitutional Metadata Maintenance Committee (IMMC), is defined as: the minimum set of metadata elements relative to the legal decision-making process, to be used in the data exchange between the institutions involved and the Publications Office.

Data in a format that can be conveniently read by a human. Some human-readable formats, such as PDF, are not machine-readable as they are not structured data, i.e. the representation of the data on disk does not represent the actual relationships present in the data.

Source: ODH.

A company that stores a customer’s data on its own (the host’s) computers and makes it available over the internet. A hosted service is one that runs and stores data on the service-provider’s computers and is accessed over the network. See also SaaS.

Source: ODH.

Document the re-use of which is associated with important benefits for society, the environment and the economy, in particular because of their suitability for the creation of value-added services, applications and new, high-quality and decent jobs, and of the number of potential beneficiaries of the value-added services and applications based on those datasets; Under the OD Directive such datasets should be in general

An event, usually over one or two days, where developers, subject experts and others come together to create apps, visualisations and prototypes that aim to address problems in a particular domain, usually making heavy use of data. Hackathons focusing on a particular collection of data are a possible form of community engagement by data publishers.

GitHub is a social coding platform allowing developers to publicly or privately build code repositories and interact with other developers around these repositories–providing the ability to download or fork a repository, as well as contribute back, resulting in a collaborative environment for software development.

Source: US OD