Reference
Last updated on 2026-10-17 | Edit this page
Glossary
- Aggregation
- Reporting counts or rates for areas instead of individual locations.
- CARE principles
- Principles for Indigenous data governance: Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics.
- Checksum
- A short code calculated from a file’s contents, used to check that it has not changed (fixity).
- Codebook
- A document describing each variable in a dataset: meaning, type, units, values and missing-value codes.
- Controlled (restricted) access
- Sharing data only with approved users, often under a data use agreement or in a secure environment.
- CoreTrustSeal
- A certification for trustworthy data repositories.
- Data curation
- Making data understandable, trustworthy and reusable over the long term by people outside the project.
- DataCite
- An organization that registers DOIs for datasets, with a standard metadata schema.
- DDI (Data Documentation Initiative)
- A metadata standard for social science survey and statistical data.
- Differential privacy
- A disclosure avoidance method that adds calibrated noise to published statistics; used for the 2020 U.S. Census.
- DOI (Digital Object Identifier)
- A persistent identifier that always resolves to the current landing page of a dataset or publication.
- Embargo
- A period during which data is described publicly but not yet available.
- FAIR principles
- Guidelines for making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
- Fixity
- The property of a file being unchanged since it was stored, checked with checksums.
- Geomasking
- Moving point locations by a random distance and direction to protect privacy; donut geomasking sets a minimum and maximum distance.
- ISO 19115
- The international metadata standard for geographic information.
- License
- A statement of what others may do with data, such as CC0, CC BY 4.0 or ODbL.
- Metadata
- Structured information describing a dataset so that it can be found, understood, judged and cited.
- OAIS (Open Archival Information System)
- A reference model (ISO 14721) describing how an archive receives, preserves and provides access to information.
- ORCID iD
- A persistent identifier for a researcher.
- Provenance
- The record of a dataset’s sources and of every process applied to it; also called lineage.
- PURR
- The Purdue University Research Repository, which publishes datasets with DataCite DOIs.
- README
- A plain-text file at the top of a dataset explaining what it is and how to use it.
- Re-identification
- Discovering the identity of a person in a supposedly anonymous dataset, for example from their locations.
- Repository
- A service that stores, preserves and provides access to data, usually with persistent identifiers.
- Suppression
- Withholding small counts or other values that could identify individuals.