[open-government] Open Data Tooling - should the OKF/others promote a set of tools for open data?

Sun Aug 21 07:28:41 UTC 2011

Alex Howard (O'Reilly Radar's government) has written a nice
feature[0] on Chicago city's moves towards open data. There's lots of
great content in the article. An excerpt I would like to draw people's
attention to is reproduced below:

"To fully embrace this vision, however, Chicago is going to have to
build out its data capabilities to become a smarter city. "The first
step is moving over to a more open platform," said Goldstein. "You
don't have to make a multi-million-dollar investment to get a fancy
GUI and something meaningful. If you bring something over to Linux,
between Python and R you can produce some remarkable outcomes. These
are some really low-cost solutions.""

One of the things he mentions on Twitter[1] is the interesting
coincidence of Python & R in Chicago's plans and a post I wrote in
early August about open data tooling[2]. It has made me wonder if
there should be calls for a standard set of tools for introducing
people to the open data. The OKF has been actively supporting
Python[3]. Is that the right approach?

Tim McNamara
Open Knowledge Foundation

[0] http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/08/chicago-data-apps-open-government.html
[1] https://twitter.com/#!/digiphile/status/104973421519179776
[2] http://notebook.okfn.org/2011/08/01/open-data-tooling/
[3] http://datapatterns.org/