Submitting data to CanWIN follows three key steps: tidy your data, submit your files and metadata, and publish your work so others can reuse it.
1. Tidy Your Data
Before submitting to CanWIN, prepare your data so it is well-structured and machine‑readable.
💡 Tips
- This one‑page primer outlines simple best practices for tidying tabular data.
- Check whether these data descriptors can be added to your file.
🛠️ Tools
- Use this app to tidy and validate your tabular (CSV) data.
2. Submit Metadata and Tidy Data
Once your data is tidy, you can upload it along with the appropriate metadata using our submission forms, or directly to CanWIN if you have been granted access.
💡 Tips
- Review these best practices for preparing metadata.
- This help page clarifies several of the metadata fields.
🛠️ Tools
- Use this app to find appropriate keywords.
🎯 Submit Here
3. Sharing the Love! (Help Others Understand and Reuse Your Data)
Reusable data retains its value long term, enabling new insights, reducing duplication, and increasing the scientific impact of your work.
At CanWIN, we use cookbooks or codebooks to capture processing workflows, and data dictionaries to define variables so they remain clear, consistent, and reliable.
💡 Tips
- See this quick primer for an overview of these methods.
🛠️ Tools
- Use this vocabulary app to standardize variable names for your data dictionary.
🎯 Create Your Cookbook/Codebook and Data Dictionary
- Cookbook or codebook template (Word); Markdown version
- Simple Data Dictionary (Excel) - Provide variable descriptions and units.
- Detailed Data Dictionary (Excel) - If you are feeling adventurous, take things a step further and standardize your variable names using the vocabulary app. Your data curator would be happy to assist!
That’s it! Share your files with your CanWIN data curator. You are welcome to add anything that enriches your dataset - photos, short videos, map stories, posters, or other knowledge products.