Collaborative practices with structured data: Do tools support what users need?

Abstract

Collaborative work with data is increasingly common and spans a broad range of activities - from creating or analysing data in a team, to sharing it with others, to reusing someone else’s data in a new context. In this paper, we explore collaboration practices around structured data and how they are supported by current technology. We present the results of an interview study with twenty data practitioners, from which we derive four high-level user needs for tool support. We compare them against the capabilities of twenty systems that are commonly associated with data activities, including data publishing software, wikis, web-based collaboration tools, and online community platforms. Our findings suggest that data-centric collaborative work would benefit from: structured documentation of data and its lifecycle; advanced affordances for conversations among collaborators; better change control; and custom data access. The findings help us formalise practices around data teamwork, and build a better understanding how people’s motivations and barriers when working with structured data.