Open Repair Data Platform (ORDP)
One of the major objectives and tasks in the Sharepair project was to develop an integrated dataspace for repair information collected as part of the project. A team of National University of Galway in Ireland took the lead in this project. The actual dataspace was given the name 'Open Repair Dataspace Platform', and is already being used by several 'clients', meaning that different online tools and dashboards are using data coming from this ORDP.
Combining different datasources on repair
There are many datasets containing relevant and valuable data about repairs. More and more, these datasets are used in campaigns fighting for the Right to Repair, and luckily also in policy making. Aggregated repair data can give very valuable insights. As in any data project, there are big challenges as to:
- work with a large and representative enough dataset
- work with clean data
- work with structured data
To give an example: a few years ago, the Open Repair Alliance was founded, in which different community repair organisations like Restarters, Anstiftung and Repair Monitor agreed on an Open Repair Data Standard that would allow them to combine the repair info registered in their respective events. The ORDS has grown since, and publishes twice a year an aggregate dataset of repairs of all associated organisations.
Scaling into an Open Repair Dataspace Platform
One of the Sharepair objectives was to take that mission of data aggregation even further, and scale it up to a less manual exercise. And that resulted in the Open Repair Dataspace Platform. The scaling goals were among others:
- to include 'data types' other then registrations of repairs done, like data about 'repair organisations', 'repair manuals' and '3D printing files'
- to have a realtime and open dataspace that can be queried by anyone or any tool or website, to retrieve specific data
A research team from National University of Galway (NUIG) consisting of Agustín García Pereira, Duc-Duy Nguyen, Ph.D Lukasz Porwol & Dr. Umair ul Hassan have developed the actual software and cloud infrastructure of this ORDP, and partners like Statik and Restarters have done first implementations of using the ORDP for end-user tools and purposes. The ORDP dataset can be consulted and queried via this endpoint: https://ordp.datascienceinstitute.ie/.
Underlying datasets
The current version of the ORDP, at the end of the Sharepair project, includes the following datasources:
- Open Repair Alliance (ORA) dataset of repairs
- Thingiverse dataset of 3D printing guides
- iFixit dataset of repair guides
- MyMinifactory dataset of 3D printing guides
- Open Repair Data Standard (ORDS)
- Repair Connects dataset of repairs
- Repair Maps dataset of repair locations
Pilot dashboards of aggregated repair data
Of course, the endpoints and query options of the ORDP are rather technical aspects, and it is difficult for end users to estimate the actual value and power of this ORDP. Therefore, different dashboards visualising the aggegated data from the ORDP were made by the team of NUIG.
They started from user stories shared by other Sharepair partners, and used the open source framework Metabase for the dashboards, since this tool was already in use for data project of the Open Repair Alliance.
Five interactive master dashboards are built and available publicly, including: