Resource providers should release the schema(ta) which formally describe(s) the format of their resource together with the resource itself. The formal account is ideally accompanied by an informal description of the format or refers to well-known standards and practices (e.g. in the case that TEI is used).

Resource providers should add a description of a typical use of of the range of uses which the resource has been used for or is usable for.

Resource providers should be as explicit as possible with respect to potential errors and the expected rate of such errors in their resource. Hints to regular patterns of error might also be useful for the potential users. For example, if an automatically part-of-speech annotated corpus is known to not well distinguish two categories which are distributionally similar, a user can decide to ignore this distinction altogether and map both classes into one more general category.

Resource providers should describe the applied methods in the case of manual annotation of a result, e.g. how many annotators, the annotation manual used, rate of inter-annotator agreement, resolving methods in the case of disagremment etc.

Users of a resource should be as clear as possible about what they are looking for. If they are looking for a resource, they should consider

Users of a resource should check whether the accompanying documentation, schema etc. meets their information needs. If this is not the case, they should come back to the resource provider or the distributor with a precise request for additional information.

Users of resources should take some time to find and compare different rescources with respect to their specific requirements.