What’s a catalog?
The catalog is a public facing area of an open data website which allows for browsing, searching, and sorting of publicly available assets. Assets on an open data website may include raw, source and federated datasets, visualizations (table, chart, map, data lens, or story) and derived views.
How can the catalog be used?Public viewers of your open data site will use the catalog to find the datasets and visualizations they need. Using the catalog, users can perform a keyword search, and filter by a category, view type or topic. Your catalog sorts assets by relevancy (most relevant), access frequency (most accessed), newness to the catalog (recently updated) and most recently updated to allow for efficient and meaningful discovery.
Making the catalog usefulDataset metadata, such as title and description, play an important role in making your catalog useful to viewers trying to find information on your site. When a viewer performs a catalog search, the search results will display based on a number of factors including metadata, number of views, and frequency of updates. Encouraging data publishers to include thoughtful metadata with their datasets will ensure that viewers get the most of the catalog.
Newly added or updated publicly available assets will show in your catalog within 1 hour of publishing. Keep in mind that datasets with a ‘private’ setting will not be visible, or available, in your public catalog. Should you need to change the privacy settings, you can do so within the “Manage” section of the dataset.
Tips and additional information
- Shortcut! At any point in time, if you would like to navigate to the catalog, append "/browse" to the domain URL.
- Currently, customizations to the catalog are not possible. If you have requests for improvement or feedback, please contact our Support team by emailing datainsights-support@tylertech.com.
- Does your catalog look different than what’s shown below? Customers using the newer version of the catalog can find information at the The New Catalog Page
1. Search: A search can be executed by performing a simple keyword search. Operators, Boolean for example, will not produce results. Results are rendered based on information contained within an asset’s metadata. The order of search results is determined, in part, by the asset’s view count and frequency of updates.
2. Categories: Clicking on a category will filter the catalog for all datasets with that category selected in the dataset metadata. These categories are set-up and customized by Administrators through the Admin panel.
View Types: Clicking on one of these will filter the catalog with data of only that type.
- Data lens pages: These are the visualization pages that are created from datasets. Clicking on this view type will also display the new visualization
- Stories: Pages created based on data, visualizations, etc.
- Datasets: These are datasets uploaded into the Data & Insights platform.
- External Datasets: links to datasets stored elsewhere on the web.
- Files and Documents: downloadable files such as PDFs or Word documents
- Filtered Views: These are saved filtered Datasets. This is a view of the type of Dataset and will be linked to the original Dataset through the "More Views" tab.
- Charts: Charts such as pie charts and bar charts created from Datasets. These will also be linked to the original Dataset through the "More Views" tab.
- Maps: Maps created from geolocation data or geospatial data (shapefile, kml, or kmz file). If it is based on geolocation data, it will also be linked to the original Dataset through the "More Views" tab.
- Calendars: Calendars created from Date&Time data in a Dataset. These will be linked to the original Dataset through the "More Views" tab.
- Forms: Forms are created from a Dataset, to collect information from users. These will be linked to the original Dataset through the "More Views" tab.
Topics: Clicking on a Topic will filter the catalog by all datasets tagged with that word. This section is populated with terms as they are tagged on Datasets in the metadata.
3. Sort: You can sort the catalog in a number of different ways:
- Alphabetical: Sorted alphanumerically.
- Most Relevant: This is generally associated with a search term, and is calculated based on a normalization of the number of views.
- Most Accessed: This is sorted by the number of views each returned result has.
- Recently Updated: Sorted by the most recently updated datasets. This also takes into account newly added datasets, as their most recent update is the date of upload.
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