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Berners-Lee Calls For Government Data Transparency

Posted by samzenpus on from the data-for-the-people dept.

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."

3 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yeah yeah, he's a smart dude by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    BinaryXML (EXI) licenses aren't cheap. Until binary XML is standardised and affordable, we're stuck with legacy sub-optimal bloated plaintext technology.

  2. A private public service project in Portugal by Sr.+Zezinho · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  3. Re:Yeah yeah, he's a smart dude by drgould · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    The advantage of transferring data as plaintext is that you can slice and dice it to your heart's content. Instead of transferring it in some binary format that may be proprietary or non-extensible or out-dated in a few years.

    In other words, plaintext is a feature not a bug.