Achieving Transparency: A Metadata Perspective

Transparency is vital to realizing the promise of evidenced-based policymaking, where "evidence-based" means including information as to what data mean and why they should be trusted. Transparency, in turn, requires that enough of this information is provided. Loosely speaking then, transparency is achieved when sufficient documentation is provided. Sufficiency is situation specific, both for the provider and consumer of the documentation. These ideas are presented in two recent US commissioned reports: The Promise of Evidence-Based Policymaking and Transparency in Statistical Information for the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and All Federal Statistical Agencies. Metadata are a more formalized kind of documentation, and in this paper, we provide and demonstrate necessary, sufficient, and general conditions for achieving transparency from the metadata perspective: conforming to a specification, providing quality metadata, and creating a usable interface to the metadata. These conditions are important for any metadata system, but here the specification is tied to our framework for metadata quality based on the situation-specific needs for transparency. These ideas are described, and their interrelationships are explored.