Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Princeton Researchers Say Feds Need Data Standard

Posted by Soulskill on from the yes,-but-which? dept.

dcblogs writes "The federal government's data-sharing efforts are a mess, and if Barack Obama really wants a useful 'Google for government,' he would have to set the government's vast amount of data free by exposing it and ensuring it complies to standards. Once that happens, commercial sites, aggregators, bloggers and everyone else will be able to access it, use it and transform it, argue a group of Princeton researchers (follow Download link for full PDF)."

9 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Add them to the buying spree. by bigtallmofo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Barack Obama really wants a useful 'Google for government,'

    Well, so far the government has bought parts of Bear Stearns and AIG. Maybe it's time they diversify into some technology companies like Google? Hell, let's buy them too!

    --
    I'm a big tall mofo.
    1. Re:Add them to the buying spree. by wisty · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You can't get the fed buying google, only losses get socialized!
      In the meantime, if you want the government to produce useful data, don't insist that they standardize. Government employees are not particularly good at standardization, and if publishing requirements slow them down, then they just won't release data. Free, standard, and available are all possible, as long as you only want 2.

    2. Re:Add them to the buying spree. by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It is more a question of whether or not citizens will be able to access government data in a meaningful way. If the government wants to standardize its data, it can, assuming it contracts with a company that actually knows what it is doing (this is the real hitch). Government employees need to be able to continue doing what they normally do, and have the standardization happen automatically -- such as a MS .doc to ODF converter that silently makes the conversion whenever a file is saved, or another tool that automatically indexes files as they are saved. Such things already exist, it is just a matter of implementing on the scale of the government.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    3. Re:Add them to the buying spree. by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, we pay tax dollars to the government, meaning anything that it does is NOT free. That leaves "standard and available" as the only two options, and I'm fine with that.

      --
      Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
  2. GOXML by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hear that Microsoft is already working on the problem with their proposed "Government Open XML" standard. This should not be confused with GOXMLb ("Google Open XML beta") because Microsoft would never try to confuse people on such an issue.

    It is going up for ISO vote next week. Be there*.

    (*) it will be very profitable for you to "be there".... nudge, nudge... wink, wink...

  3. Looks like a job for Microsoft! by erroneus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What you need is not one [set of] standard(s) but one vendor controlling and maintaining those standards... they know what is best for all of us because they are paid professionals, not hack hobbyists.

    (Yes! I am kidding!!)

  4. Re:Welcome to the "duh" department by Talchas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, but it takes at least a team of researchers to get the government to listen.

    --
    As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century,free flow of information is the only safeguard against...
  5. Re:Shakespeare:To share or not to share? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Informative

    We are not talking about the government sharing data on individual citizens or on military secrets. We are talking about things involving government spending, contracts, loans, grants, etc. Things that citizens should have access to, but have trouble organizing.

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  6. Good advice doesn't always have good result by feenberg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I use lots of government supplied data in my work, and one constant has always been that the more work the agency does to make the data easily available, the harder the data are to use. Spreadsheets get posted with labels and data mixed, because that looks better in print. Spreadsheets get posted as PDFs, because that looks better in print. Footnotes and other textual material is mixed into numeric fields, because that is the way the material will be published in hardcopy. etc etc etc.

    Databases get posted to the web with "interfaces" that allow single rows to be downloaded, but require months of screen scraping to get the entire database. Databases get released with (windows-only, of course) software with the same effect. etc etc etc

    The reason is mostly that agencies want to discourage outside analysis of the data - they would prefer to avoid inconsistent messages getting to OMB or congress.