Add your content to the Massachusetts Data Hub
The Data Hub helps Mass.gov visitors find content containing data on Mass.gov and other state websites.
The Commonwealth is committed to sharing data transparently and openly to better serve constituents and demonstrate the value of our state agencies’ work. In support of this goal, we’ve created the Massachusetts Data Hub, a tool for helping constituents find, browse, and use content where data is published.
We hope your organization will contribute content to the Data Hub. The more content in the Hub, the more useful it will be as a resource for constituents, and the more likely they are to find and use your organization’s data.
What kinds of content belongs in the Hub?
The Data Hub connects constituents to pages on Mass.gov and other state websites that contain data. This usually means content with:
Downloadable data files
Data published on the page itself (e.g. in a table)
Data dashboards embedded on the page
Your data does not need to be published on Mass.gov to be in the Data Hub. If your agency owns another web property where your data is available, you can add it to the Hub.
How do you request that your content be added to the Data Hub?
To get your content into the Data Hub, submit a request. The form is also embedded in the CMS, and you can find it on your home screen when you login.
Once we’ve received your request, here’s what will happen:
We’ll review your content to make sure it meets the minimum standards for the Data Hub. See below for the criteria we use to make these decisions.
We may reach out to you to recommend changes. Usually, these have to do with making content more findable, or providing more context for what the data is, how to interpret it, etc.
Once changes have been published, we’ll add your content to the Data Hub.
What qualifies as Data Hub content?
When we review pages for the Data Hub, we consider both the content and the data. We want to be sure that every page in the Hub:
Has a title and headings that include terms people might use in searches
Has information that helps a visitor understand what the data is and how it can be used
Is accessible
In the future, we also plan to release standards around data formatting, including:
Publishing data files in a machine-readable format (csv, json, xml)
Sample schemas for tabular data
How to consolidate a dataset split into multiple files
Publishing an accompanying data dictionary
More on what kind of content belongs in the Data Hub.
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