[Geodata] Fwd: [Geowanking] Interesting article on Open Data (crossposted)

[Jo Walsh]

On 03/02/2010 15:33, Schuyler Erle wrote:
> Great read.
> http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/02/rethinking-open-data.html

Right, my takeaway from this piece was "build something that's useful to 
real people [cough]", with mainstream-accessible interfaces and 
compelling visualisations. An example in open govdata context:

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/ - an OKF project to provide an 
interface to spatial statistics about UK government spending, with 
visualisation concept by the lovely Liz Turner of iconomical.

But. Successful free software projects also need to emphasise:
- Ease of re-use and re-purpose of the work by other people unconnected 
to the community
- Sustainability of the effort beyond the original contributors

(The latter being an important rationale for existence of OSGeo)

So Nat may be spot-on in terms of short-term tactics. In longer-term 
perspective, data infrastructure issues *are* important, can't be safely 
ignored:

- Can we merge versions of the same data source that have been corrected 
in different places?
- Can we federate search across different registries or catalogues, or 
do we still need a Google-for-data one ring to rule them all?
- Can we treat data like software, with packages and release cycles... 
or is data more of a stream, a trickle of updates negating the idea of 
"version"?

These are the questions being discussed around OKF right now. This may 
have been pure infrastucture-wanking a few years ago[0], but there are 
real problems asking these questions now (conflation of OSM with Google 
MapMaker data for Haiti, for example).

Parallel needs - on the one hand mainstreaming, persuasion, 
Real-Person-friendly visualisation. On the other, deep inspection of the 
ways in which the problems in open data diverge from those in software, 
scale up and become weirder.

love,


jo

[0] An old blog post which touches on some of this, in OSM context:
http://mappinghacks.com/2007/04/19/the-openstreetmap-new-data-model-army/