[open-government] Call for Collaboration: publicbodies.org

[Friedrich Lindenberg]

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Chris Taggart <countculture at gmail.com> wrote:
> Definite +1 from me (but then you prob knew that anyway). We've got some
> from OpenlyLocal and like you the spending data, but would be good to pull
> this together. FWIW think it should be separate from OpenSpending (and poss
> even OKF) to avoid making a single point of power/failure (one of the
> reasons I haven't wanted to do it for OpenCorporates), but think everybody
> in this space would benefit from such a thing existing.

I'm very happy to discuss governance on this! To be clear: this is not
funded work but weekend hacking and I put in OKFN as copyright holder
and domain owner more by default than by consideration. It buys us
nothing to try to own it. If there is some entity that should run this
I'd love to move it over, but I think from a neutrality and community
POV OKF is not a bad place.

>From a technical POV I was considering to allow users to register a
namespace (e.g. an ISO country name space) and then to start uploading
lists without much interference from me or anyone else, but then again
this has many many issues.

- Friedrich

> --
> -------------------------------------------------------
> OpenCorporates :: The Open Database of the Corporate
> World http://opencorporates.com
> OpenlyLocal :: Making Local Government More
> Transparent http://openlylocal.com
> Blog: http://countculture.wordpress.com
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/CountCulture
>
> On 4 July 2011 15:02, Friedrich Lindenberg <friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> having done some work on spending data analysis, I think there is a
>> demand not only for a reconciliation service for companies (which the
>> excellent OpenCorporates.com provides), but also for public entities
>> of all kinds. As an example of the problem, look at
>> http://openspending.org/dataset/ukdepartments/dimension/department_family
>> (totals are broken atm).
>>
>> As a big fan of OpenCorporates approach on companies, I'd like to
>> propose the creation of a copycat service at publicbodies.org -
>> perhaps with less entity metadata but as an endpoint for
>> reconciliation of public bodies.
>>
>> In order to help with this, I'd like to ask everyone's support in a
>> brief survey:
>>
>> * Does such a service already exist?
>> * Which countries and admin regions publish (machine-readable) lists
>> of public bodies, departments etc.?
>> * Which identifier schemes/taxonomies exist for the classification of
>> such entities?
>> * Any other hints?
>>
>> Thanks for your help!
>>
>> - Friedrich
>>
>> p.s. As for software implementation, I've started a very basic
>> python-based recon server at https://github.com/okfn/helmut to
>> familiarize myself with the API. This can be customized for
>> publicbodies.org but also used in other places, e.g. for MIME types,
>> Taxonomies etc. - wherever we have fuzzy values that need to be
>> matched to a set of given URIs.
>>
>> --
>> Open Knowledge Foundation
>> Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
>> http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/
>>
>> http://twitter.com/pudo
>> http://pudo.org
>
>
>
>



-- 
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