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Australian Stats Agency Goes Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the as-it-should-be dept.

jimboh2k writes "The Australian Bureau of Statistics will use the 2011 Census of Population and Housing as a dry run for XML-based open source standards DDI and SDMX in a bid to make for easier machine-to-machine data, allowing users to better search for and access census datasets. The census will become the first time the open standards are used by an Australian Federal Government agency."

8 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. XML? that's so 1990 by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm perplexed why people continue to use XML when there is YAML. What is it that makes XML so attractive as a durable format? it's not human readable in a practicale sense, and YAML very much is. Since it's delimeters are comlicated and variable, It's harder to parse in ad hoc ways than yaml (line and white space) which means that for rapidly extracting things there are no shorcuts to instantiating a whole document. It's hard to grep. And both formats can fully do the other ones job so they are interchangeable.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:XML? that's so 1990 by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Informative

      To see how clean YAML is to reads for humans and to parse by machine look at a Sample Document. And here's something truly impressive, a Yaml Quick reference card written entirely in YAML itself. Not only is it a marvelously short card, it's human and machine readable. It's a superset of JSON too.

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    2. Re:XML? that's so 1990 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Interesting. How does YAML handle validation and user defined grammars?

      Multiple ways of varing stringency. For the simple case you can define types (.e.g. floats, ints, or user defined types). For the vast majority of uses that's all you need for validation. Now if you want to define a schema there are several different ones that are used. Kwalify and Rx are two. Finally, there are YAML 2 XML converters. So you can just convert the YAML to XML and use your favorite XML validator. Thus the validation itself other than the types is not baked into the definition and thus people have overlayed flexible approaches to this.

    3. Re:XML? that's so 1990 by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Great for human readability. Terrible (due to some python-like indent rules) for humans to add content to.

      Oh come on man. This is like the ancient discarded whitespace lament about python. I was once like you before I started writing python. Then I saw the huge huge light of why white space indenting is so great. I could explain but I'm not sure I could have convinced even myself before trying it.

      Bottom line. it's freakin easy to get the white space right and any decent editor with context sensitive tabs does it for you. emacs, vim, bbedit, eclipse. Is there any that don't?

      This is a NON ISSUE

      Meanwhile, XML might not be quite as nice as YAML for reading, but it is easier to figure out where you made a mistake, assuming you're pretty printing it (but the best thing is that pretty printing it is unnecessary).

      Ha! you make me laugh. So now we need special editors and printers for XML reading. Were we not just complaining about white space. Now you pretty print to put perfect white space in XML?

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  2. The First Time? by digipres · · Score: 2

    "The census will become the first time the open standards are used by an Australian Federal Government agency."

    Really?
    http://xena.sourceforge.net/

  3. British Commonwealth Apples & Oranges by the_other_one · · Score: 2

    Australia is openly embracing census data and enhancing it's availability.
    Canada's government is going out of its way to prevent census data collection.

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    134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
  4. Actually open source seems fine in Munich by perpenso · · Score: 2

    Munich Linux migration is "dead - abandoned in all but name."

    Last I heard it was a migration to open source and they were successfully using open source desktop applications. The operating system may be Windows rather than Linux but this still seems to be a victory for open source. On the desktop the applications are far more important than the operating system.

  5. Re:Python: YMMV by Raumkraut · · Score: 2

    When is it ever desirable for indentation to not match the logical structure of a program?
    The only possible reason I can come up with is if you're intentionally attempting to obfuscate your code.