Contribute to Open Power System Data

Most people working in electricity market modelling have some experience in cleaning up and processing data. Are you one of them? Do you do these things script-based as well and your programming language of choice is one of the ones supported by Jupyter (like Python, R, or Julia)? Are you willing to share your scripts and data, so that others don’t have to do your work again? Then you are very welcome to share your data package through our platform. Your scripts and data will be marked as “external contribution” in contrast to the content we developed within the funded project.

There are just a few conditions that have to be met:

  • All data processing (from data download to writing the final CSV file) must be script based (in one of the languages supported by Jupyter).
  • The scripts must be provided in the form of Jupyter notebooks as Open Source under the MIT license and uploaded to Github.
  • Your CSV files have to conform to our standards (comma as field separator, only one line of headers, UTF-8 file encoding, timestamps in ISO 8601 format) and our notebook guideline).
  • A datapackage.json file with metadata about your data package has to be included (see Data Package standard by OKFN for details).
  • Your proposed data package has to fit within the overall vision of our project and must be complementary to the data we provide. We suggest getting in touch with us to check this before putting in any work.
  • The sources you use must be “official” sources, such as regulatory authorities or TSOs.
  • Your script can only be published if the source agrees to publish its data under an open data license (we will need a written agreement of the data provider). Contact us if you are unsure about this point or need help or alternative options in this regard.

Once these conditions are sorted out, there are just 3 steps to participate:

  • Create your script for generating the data package, which does all steps from data download to writing the final CSV. Make sure the CSV data file you generate in the script conforms to our CSV file guidelines. Also, generate some meta data for your new data package in the form of a datapackage.json file (see OKFN Data Package standard for details).
  • Upload your script (in the form of a Jupyter notebook) to Github and license it under the MIT Open Source license.
  • Upload your data (CSV files and datapackage.json meta data) to a Dropbox and share it with us. We will then make sure it gets published on our platform. We don’t need any additional descriptive texts etc. for the website, as that is all auto-generated out of the datapackage.json file you provide us with.

Feel free to get in touch with us to discuss all the details.