Data Publishing Process

If you want to publish data, book office hours with DataSF to get started.

Someone from our team will meet with you to:

• Discuss the value, risks, and uses of your datasets

• Explain the publishing process (including what you will do and what we will do)

• Answer any questions

If you are sure your data is safe to publish (it does not carry a privacy or security risk), you can move on to the next step.

If your data carries a privacy or security risk, you will need to make changes to reduce the risk. 

We've created toolkits to help you decide if your data is safe to publish and what to do next.

To share your data with the public, we need to move it from wherever it lives (your database, system, app, spreadsheet, etc.) onto our platform. This process is often referred to a "extract, transform, load" (ETL) or building a data pipeline.

• If your data doesn't need to be updated, you can manually publish your data.
• If you update your data more often, we can set up an automated data pipeline to refresh your dataset on predetermined cadence.

Metadata is the information you will include with your dataset when you publish it.

It should help people understand how to use the dataset and how the dataset was made.

Here is how to write your metadata.