Data.gov: Evolving Data.gov With You

Comments (7)

1. 

   dbaker

   Open data standards will be very important. Although the data may be made available by the government it may have initially been provided from a source external to the government. Global standards will facilitate this river of data. If citizens are creating data that that will become part of government-published data then we have to ensure that large software vendors are not the only suppliers of solutions that can produce standards-compliant data.

   3 years ago

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2. 

   owen.ambur

   AIIM is considering whether to propose the specification of an XML schema for the Dublin Core as an international de jure standard.

   3 years ago

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3. 

   owen.ambur

   It would be good to enable query/discovery of data sets based upon the strategic goals and objectives they support as well as the stakeholders having interests in them.

   The Strategy Markup Language (StratML) standard (ANSI/AIIM 21:2009) will enable such queries.

   3 years ago

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4. 

   Chuck Georgo

   There is an existing open standard (term used loosely) that we should take advantage of--the National Information Exchange (NIEM). While it is not perfect, it does provide a good platform for defining data elements (sytactically and semantically) across federal lines of business and should provides a means for sharing strucutures for common agency information exchanges. I would encourage agencies take a page from the Justice Information Exchange Model (JIEM) and document their information exchange requirements (IER) and then use the NIEM program to develop and share appropriate IEPDs.

   On the subject of standardizing XML schemas, it's important to remember that XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language--IMHO, it's designed to be messy ;-)

   3 years ago

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5. 

   charleshoffman

   I would go even further and say to use existing standards, rather than create new standards, would be even more appropriate. Why reinvent the wheel? Creating standards is hard work and takes a lot of time. There are tremendous benefits to picking up existing global standards rather than creating new ones. Besides, existing standards already have a robust software infrastructure built up around them.

   For example, both the FDIC and the SEC adopted XBRL, rather than creating their own standard for collecting financial information from those they regulate. The cost savings experienced by the FDIC are documented and published. The FDIC already had an electronic mechinism for collecting information, but it was their "standard" (i.e. proprietary to the FDIC).

   3 years ago

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6. 

   Paul Wilkinson

   Moreover, being global means being used globally. Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands are using XBRL to support Standard Business Reporting (SBR), which means government will collect better data in the first place via validation and less expensive collection and auditing. That in turn means that they will be able to publish more reliable information. Japan and China, among others, are using XBRL for financial reporting. There's a useful paper from the Australian government at http://www.treasury.gov.au/documents/1633/PDF/1_SBR.pdf

   3 years ago

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7. 

   hozelda

   It would help if the data downloads were not in a proprietary binary format like exe. exe is useless to many researchers and tools and poses a security risk to many of those that are able to run exe on their system.

   3 years ago

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