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Open data

Two datasets, both published under CC BY 4.0, both generated from the same files that build the pages you can read here. Neither contains clinical advice, and neither is meant to be read on screen: they exist to be downloaded, cited and argued with.

What is published here

The first is the glossary. Twenty-six terms from a dermatology consultation, each with a plain-English definition, the layer of skin it belongs to where that applies, and a link to the page it comes from. Anyone writing about skin can lift the lot, provided they say where it came from.

The second is stranger and, we suspect, more useful. It records which health organisations this site cites, what licence each publishes under, whether linking is permitted, whether reproduction is permitted, and the date every one of those answers was last confirmed. That register had to exist before a single page could be written. Keeping it private seemed wasteful once it was done.

Why give it away?

Because this site already argues, on its own pages, that a non-commercial licence makes data unusable. The World Health Organization publishes under terms that forbid commercial reuse, which is why nothing of theirs is reproduced here however useful it would have been. Having made that complaint in public, imposing the same restriction on our own material would have been hard to defend.

There is a second reason, less high-minded. Data that can be reused gets cited, and citation is how a small site earns the right to be taken seriously. We would rather be quoted with attribution than ignored with our rights intact.

Formats and stability

Each one comes as JSON and as CSV. The JSON carries the licence, the attribution string and a description alongside the records; the CSV opens in a spreadsheet without ceremony and is encoded so that Excel does not mangle it. Neither file is minified, because a file meant to be inspected should be readable.

Both are regenerated from source at every build, and the build refuses to complete if a published file has drifted from the pages it describes. A file that quietly falls out of step with its own site is worse than nothing at all, since the people relying on it have no way of knowing.

What is deliberately not here

No clinical information of any kind. There are no prevalence figures, no severity scores, no diagnostic criteria and no treatment thresholds, and their absence is a position rather than an oversight. This site does not diagnose, and a machine-readable file is the very last place a diagnostic criterion should be published, because it will be recombined by people who never see the caveats attached to it.

Definitions and provenance are different in kind. A definition explains what a word means, which is safe to publish and useful to almost everybody. Data about who publishes what, under which terms, is administrative. Neither can be turned into advice about a particular person's skin, and that is precisely why these two were chosen over anything more clinically interesting.

The datasets

How to cite

Attribution is the only condition, and the attribution string travels inside each file so that nobody has to invent one. A link back to the dataset page satisfies it. Where you are quoting a single definition rather than the set, linking the glossary entry itself is more useful to your reader and equally acceptable to us.

One request that the licence does not let us enforce, so we make it as a request. If you republish the licence register, carry the check dates with it. Those dates are most of what the register is worth, and stripped of them it becomes a set of confident assertions about other people's legal terms.