[Open-data-census] Refinement of the categories of census.okfn.org

Tue Dec 3 08:33:00 UTC 2013

Greetings,

In the last couple of weeks, I helped compiling some information for
http://census.okfn.org/country/overview/Germany and I would like to
make a few unsorted remarks especially on the criteria:

* Definition for "National Map" is blurry. Given the lack of
specification, a simple shape file for nationa boundaries could be
sufficient. Apart from this, 1:250,000 (whatever that means for a
vector file) is a low threshold. Future survey should check if the
national map contains at a minimum certain features such as hills,
major roads, city boundaries, rivers and lakes and landmarks.

* "National Statistics" is a mess as it currently only requires
selections of datasets from statistics to be available. The definition
"a reasonable amount of both economic and demographic information
available" does not help much. I would rather suggest a fixed set of
statistics that need to be there without exception.

* The definition for "Is it openly licensed?" is flawed: "It is vital
that a licence is available (if there's no licence, the data is not
openly licensed).". Especially legal texts are often not subject to
copyright, there is no need for a license in order to be freely
reusable.

Mathias

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Mathias Schindler
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