Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee Calls For Government Data Transparency
eldavojohn writes "Two months ago, Tim Berners-Lee unveiled a UK Government data project with the goal to make government data more useful for everyone. Today he is calling on the rest of the world's governments to become more transparent with their nonsensitive data. After only a few months, his project boasts around forty applications for using government data (screenshot example here). The BBC article notes the interesting uses of public data in India and Brazil that are disappointingly lacking in other countries — even the United States. Hopefully the US's data.gov will evolve to hosting apps instead of just data."
The thing that gets me is that TBL designed the internet protocols we use every day. Yet they are so full of plaintext and the technology to process it is all based around slicing and dicing this data up to turn it back into usable binary data that it's amazing we've come this far on such a rickety technology.
Mr. Linux Nutsack, I respect your opinion on this matter, but BadAnalogyGuy is actually correct, whether he was trying to be funny or not.
The World Wide Web is built upon a base of rickety technology. Basically every web-related technology is a hack. JavaScript is one of the most significant hacks, in order to add interactivity. Cookies are a hack, in order to get around a lack of state storage. The various HTTP headers relating to caching are one of the most miserable of hacks. The ability of browsers to accept even the shittiest of HTML is another huge hack. The compression of HTTP responses is another hack. SSL is a hack. HTML5 will bring a boatload of new hacks to the table.
The web only works today because so many people have invested so much time in creating these hacks, and then spending literally years debugging them and getting them to a point where they're somewhat "standardized" and sort of work, most of the time.
is analogous to asking for banking reform in the United States of Amerika.
Yours In Perm,
K. Trout
Of particular note is the ASBOrometer which is a mobile application (iPhone and Android) that measures levels of anti-social behaviour at your current location (within England and Wales) and gives you access to key local ASB statistics. This app was number one in the top free UK iTunes app store last week.
So, this application keeps tracks of all nerds like me? Pretty harsh for not going outside...
This space is not for rent.
An interesting project coming from a private foundation, instead of the government, is Pordata, a database of statistical data about Portugal:
http://www.pordata.pt/
os trabalhos e os dias: http://zmoreira.net
You will see everything in front of the government, you will see everything behind the government, but you won't see what the government is today and what it is doing, because the government will be, well, transparent.
Ezekiel 23:20
"data.gov" should not host "apps". Just release the raw data, and let others analyze it.
If the Government provides "apps", they will be limited in annoying ways and won't be integrated with data from other sources.
The reason that data.gov is, and will remain, so lame is that it was done through an unconstitutional unfunded mandate. Which brings up an important topic - the OMB and Bush's silent coup.
Few people have picked up on this, but President Bush, whether through impatience or malice, attempted a silent coup to usurp many of the powers of Congress. He did this through the Office of Management and Budget. Normally it is Congress that sets up federal programs, and passes legislation which both enables and funds them. Bush attempted to create a back-door path to implement programs he couldn't get through Congress. Every year, all federal agencies give their budget requests to the OMB to be assembled into the Presidents budget request to Congress. Bush decided that he could use this mechanism to extort agencies into doing his will. He had the OMB issue directives, then threatened agencies that if they didn't execute the directives, the OMB would cut their budget request to Congress. The problem was that since these directives were never enacted by Congress, they weren't themselves funded. Thus agencies were blackmailed into diverting funds that were supplied by Congress for real programs into non-Congressionally approved directives or face back-door budget cuts. Using this unconstitutional method of forcing agencies to implemented unfunded directives, the Bush administration started a slew of clandestine activities of debatable merit. There was implementation of IPv6, there was the Trusted Internet Connections directive to force agencies to use the illegally sole-sourced Einstein boxes from NSA, then there was the HSPD12 directive for new employee badges and background checks, etc. etc. etc. When President Obama was elected, agencies rejoiced, hoping that the mandate for change would include abandoning the use of unfunded directives enforced through blackmail. However to their dismay, Obama has embraced the Bush legacy, and is now using htis mechanism to attempt to implement a number of ideas that the Whitehouse is too lazy to run through Congress first. Data.gov is unfortunately one of these unconstitutional programs, which is why it is doomed to forever be pathetic, under-executed, and lame.
Here's his TED Talk on the subject.
"(EXI) format specification written in the Java programming language."
That's Java, dude. Browser developers use C/C++. Until it's in the browser, it hasn't arrived.
Pick a name!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
City of Vancouver data is open now, at: http://data.vancouver.ca/ Still can't find a goddam list of all the buildings in Vancouver. How hard is that? Statistics Canada are still dinosaurs. They charge for access to data we paid them to collect.
Browsers? I haven't seen anyone mentioning browsers.
Ezekiel 23:20
You don't just consider the format in isolation, you need to consider the application.
If we are to create, transmit and parse optimal, efficiently compressed content on the interwebz, the browsers need to be able to parse it and tools, scripting languages, etc. need to be able to read/write the format.
EXI appears to be a good solution, but there is no low cost C/C++ implementation that I am aware of.
Agile Delta (EXI inventor) have a C/C++ solution, but it's $loadsamoney.
An unrestricted (ie. not GPL or dual licensed) C/C++ reference implementation would be handy if this format is to become widely adopted.
FastInfoSet (alternative BinaryXML proposal) solutions are available at lower cost (including open source/free), but the W3C alledges that EXI is a superior format.
http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI
If anyone has the mood to port the Java EXI reference implementation to C/C++ that would move this discussion beyond chat and into a realization phase.
I'd be happy to do it, but like most of us, I'm a little busy with other work.
I still have gopher sites in my bookmarks, it's likely their dead links though.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
> I assume in this context "plaintext" really means "XML" In this context plaintext does refer to XML including, but not limited to optimal XHTML compression, decompression & parsing. >And you can convert to/from binary format whenever this is required. Which (C/C++) libraries support binary XML serialization in EXI format ?
But data.gov is not hosting apps, just the data. It's doing this webby thing TBL invented called "linking" to them.
Almost magically, they are actually hosted and written by by entirely different people and organisations, and yet you can access them from data.gov's own pages.
Maybe you should click on one of those "links" at the top of this page and RTFA...