Network Cards: concise, readable summaries of network data

TL;DR

This paper introduces network cards, standardized, concise summaries for network datasets that include statistics, provenance, and ethical info, supported by schemas, templates, and software for broad research utility.

Contribution

It proposes a comprehensive framework for creating network dataset summaries, including key elements, schemas, and tools, to improve data transparency and usability.

Findings

Network cards effectively summarize network datasets.

They include data construction, provenance, and ethical considerations.

Tools facilitate widespread adoption of network cards.

Abstract

The deluge of network datasets demands a standard way to effectively and succinctly summarize network datasets. Building on similar efforts to standardize the documentation of models and datasets in machine learning, here we propose network cards, short summaries of network datasets that can capture not only the basic statistics of the network but also information about the data construction process, provenance, ethical considerations, and other metadata. In this paper, we lay out (1) the rationales and objectives for network cards, (2) key elements that should be included in network cards, and (3) example network cards to underscore their benefits across a variety of research domains. We also provide a schema, templates, and a software package for generating network cards.