Comments on: Making more government data and information available

By: asa letourneau

asa letourneau — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:55:15 +0000

Overall, my view is don’t over-complicate and iterate quickly.

Great post Craig! Looking forward to data support provided by web3.0 communities which may be a lot more meaningful and realiseable than that provided by government.

By: Marghanita da Cruz

Marghanita da Cruz — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:00:06 +0000

Information about companies – particularly those in which Superannuation funds invest, needs to be made freely available, to the public, in a co-ordinated way across the regulators – ASIC, APRA, ASX etc.

We need a continous disclosure framework for government funded programs and infrastructure projects.

By: Mike Nelson

Mike Nelson — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:08:52 +0000

One practical suggestion on something that could (and should) happen sooner rather than later is to trial a version of data.gov in Australia. There are already publicly available data sets which could be used in such a trial. Just put the data sets and metadata out there and see what happens.

By: Ann Steward

Ann Steward — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:50:52 +0000

Thank you all for your comments, you have again raised some very important points for the Taskforce to consider. It is particularly useful to have your ideas about what could and should happen sooner
(for example Stephen’s suggestion of Taskforce developed principles being of more immediate benefit than a refined ruleset).

The longer term considerations are no less critical, and these will also of course stay before the Taskforce as we review the submissions, commission some of the project ideas and work on the report to Government.

By: Rae Buerckner

Rae Buerckner — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:04:45 +0000

Hi Ann, I agree with Craig on this the only real thing blocking publishing data at this time appears to the percieved licensing issues. There are many agencies who have overcome this issue and have been openly publishing data sets for years. Some examples of these are listed here: Current available spacial data sets ABS data sets Victorian Emergency Services data sets Climate data sets Environmental and heritage data sets Education data sets And that is just a few of them. I would suggest talking to the Agencies above as well as Open Australia and solving the licensing misconception is the first big step. The W3C publish and maintain the standards for the XML Schema format for data services here is a link to those standards. The XML schema language is well defined, clear and easy to use. Cheers, Rae

By: Craig thomler

Craig thomler — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:40:38 +0000

Hi Ann,

Regarding your follow up question on support, the OpenAustralia experience is one to learn from. They have been attempting for months to clarify if they can reuse state Hansard data sets and the primary difficulties have been with clarifying the licensing arrangements.

If licensing is clear upfront and the data is structured using descriptive tags many potential data queries would not need to occur.

If other words, being clear means saving governments money in having public servants explain individually each time an explanation is requested.

It could be seen as having the equivalent of a knowledgebase rather than constantly training contact staff.

By: Mike Nelson

Mike Nelson — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:13:31 +0000

We don't need to reinvent the wheel. The US and UK have already worked through these issues and both have workable (although different) solutions. The US has data.gov and the UK has the National Digital Archive of Datasets. I think we are also getting several issues confused. Web 2.0 is social networking. I cannot see the point of getting too hung up on transitory fads like Facebook and Twitter when research shows that most of the content is pointless babble. And, to be perfectly honest, I include some government Web 2.0 services in this. What we are talking about here is describing, publishing, using and linking data along with its meaning and context (rich metadata). This is what the Semantic Web (also called Web 3.0) is all about. The semantic layer is the next major step forward and this is where efforts should be focussed NOW, not 2-3 years after the horse has bolted and left us behind. data.gov is already doing just this. The tools are already there and have been since at least 1998. We just need to start using them.

By: xtfer

xtfer — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:50:09 +0000

I’d rather have an unsupported data set than wait for a Government Department to “support” it somehow. Additionally, there’s a lot of data in agencies which the agency probably can’t “support” in this sense.

We should also distinguish between “understanding the data” support, and “how to I access your XML-RPC” type support. They are very different cases.

By: xtfer

xtfer — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:47:38 +0000

While I was writing this, Craig Thomler covered most of my points in a far more concise manner. I agree with everything he said.

By: xtfer

xtfer — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:44:29 +0000

I also do not think its necessary to set out too much at the beginning. That said, there are some crucial enablers that could be recommended, such as:

1) A license which provides for reuse (such as Creative Commons)
2) Recommendations for standards to use (such as Atom, RDF, etc)

Other items such as retention, archiving, completeness, support and so on are going to vary greatly between data sets, or be irrelevant. For example, the concept of archiving data is spurious when that data is available through an API.

Also, metadata is part of the dataset, if not the dataset itself.