Introduction to Data Sharing

The focus of this playbook is to provide information and insights about data sharing for research and to spur innovation. In this respect their are many different ways in which data can be exchanged. Here we look at three different data sharing approaches based on the paper Bringing Code to Data. Although the focus of this research paper is the governance needed for data exchange, the distinction in three data sharing approaches provides a good start to get more grip on the matter.

The figure above shows the three approaches: Copy and Download, Researcher to Data and finally Model to Data, these models provide increasing capacity for security, reliability and privacy while also being increasing complexity to implement.

Depending on the specific needs and requierments for subsequent analysis, a balance may be struck between implementation feasibility and requirements for security, privacy and reliability. In the following pages we will describe these approaches and both their advantages and disadvantages in a bit more detail.

See also

For more background information on data sharing, we recommend reading the article the key to further digitisation presented by TNO.