For many years the promise of open data was simple: make your data public, make it shareable, and good things follow. I still believe this. But the question now is, can you trust the data and the sources it came from?
We are surrounded now by so much content that looks credible but is not. AI can produce a confident answer from a source that, in many cases, no one can check or verify. To cite one example of the impact of this, of the more than 1,600 biomedical researchers from 80 countries that took part in a 2024 international survey, 72% agreed their field faces a crisis because many published study results cannot be independently verified or repeated.
The problem is not that we lack data. It is that we cannot verify and, hence, trust a lot of it.
At Link Digital, we are working towards verifiable honesty. This means that, rather than asking you to trust the data from a system you cannot see into, a clear statement of intent is published up front, and what actually happens can be checked against it.
To see it live, we are running a CKAN instance as a provenance sandbox, where experiments are published as datasets, each carrying their intent and an external witness. One record is a position. Two agreeing records are a knowing. For anyone who runs a CKAN portal, it is a glimpse of what the platform can hold beyond the data itself: the record of how that data came to be.
I want to be honest about where the project sits, because honesty is the whole point. It is an early experiment. The doors are open to look and open to join.
This is related to a project Link Digital is participating in called the Objective Observer Initiative. We will walk through the sandbox live at CKAN Monthly Live on 19 August, so if you want to see how it works on a real portal, please join us.
And if the idea of a portal that holds not just data but the accountability trail around it interests you, come and explore and register your interest through Link Lab.
