[Okfn-ca] Fwd: [open-government] Examples of open data leading to increase in data quality?

Fri Aug 30 19:18:49 UTC 2013

I absolutely agree with Peder here.
When I wrote about cleaning data, I meant this mostly *in the service
of*compatiblity with metadata.

On a tangential point, I would argue that new crowdsourcing techniques can
solve the straw
into gold problem. The
reCaptcha<https://app.getsignals.com/link?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Frecaptcha%2Flearnmore&ukey=agxzfnNpZ25hbHNjcnhyGAsSC1VzZXJQcm9maWxlGICAgIDmnK4KDA&k=2153a83541db481389faca6b36c0681a>system
is one example of this.

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Peder Jakobsen <pjakobsen at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 2013-08-30, at 10:39 AM, Diane Mercier <diane.mercier at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to bring your attention to this thread on the quality of data
> as published on the list [open-government].
>
> Ted Strauss focus there on the importance of " cleaning " datasets to
> improve their quality. This is certainly a major challenge for public
> organizations, since forty years, a multitude of information systems has
> proliferated and that without extended standardization and  openness rules.
> In my opinion, this is a direct and serious consequence of the use of proprietary
> software that we inherit today.
>
>
> The important task is not cleaning the data, but extracting enough
> meaningful fields from or associated with those records so you can automate
> the creation of standard metadata information to be indexed by a search
> engine, then to be delivered via an API.   This is the core task of 99 % of
> all open data work on the planet at the moment.     As long as the metadata
> is good, those with an incentive to use the data will figure out a way to
> make sense of it.   If they don't, they probably don't need the data all
> that badly (Economics 101)
>
> The vast majority of source code generated by the OKFN serves the purpose
> of metadata creation.  Projects for cleaning data usually whither and die
> on the vine, because you can't spin straw into gold unless your name is
> Rumpelstiltskin
>
> Cleaning actual source data may be task as massive as curing  cancer or
> putting and end to global warming, but the marginal benefit a dollar spent
> on such an effort  is suspect, and probably unnecessary.
>
> Peder Jakobsen
> Ottawa
>
>
>
>
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>
>

-- 
Ted Strauss
Co-founder of Trudat.co <http://trudat.co/>

I'm organizing Open Data Exchange <http://odx13.com/> in Montreal, April 6,
2013
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