[open-government] [openhouseproject] The Four "A"s of Open Government Data

Sun Feb 12 18:55:29 UTC 2012

Thank you all for the helpful information and good strategy for the days
ahead.
Best Regards,
Charles

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Gregory Slater <tenkyuu at pacbell.net>wrote:

>
> What about 'API' for the fourth 'A' ?
>
> On the other hand, one might argue that ease of programmatic readablity is
> another facet of 'Accessibility', since in the age of 'big data', data is
> not really accessible if it isn't formatted for programmatic access.  In
> fact, one way of thwarting transparency is to overwhelm the user in
> enormous volumes of documents that effectively cannot be parsed, summarized
> and searched efficiently.  Think of the last scene of 'Raiders of the Lost
> Ark'…
>
> Anyway, I totally agree that programmatic machine readability is
> absolutely key for big data
> Thanks for thoughts,
>
>  - Greg Slater
>
>
> On Feb 11, 2012, at 5:43 PM, Josh Tauberer wrote:
>
> > Last week the House Committee on House Administration (here in the U.S.)
> > held a conference on legislative data and transparency. Reynold
> > Schweickhardt, the committee’s director of technology policy, made an
> > interesting observation at the start of the day that policy for public
> > information often is framed in terms of 3 A's:
> >
> >    accessibility,
> >    authenticity, and
> >    accuracy.
> >
> > I thought about that over the next few hours. They are good principles.
> > And yet us data geeks so often find ourselves having to start from
> > scratch explaining why clean data is so important. It seems
> > contradictory: if accuracy is a concept practitioners in government get,
> > and if 'clean' is a type of accuracy, then there must be some
> > communications failure here if we're having a hard time explaining open
> > data to government agencies. (To be clear, Reynold totally gets it.)
> >
> >    --------------------------------------------
> >    TLDR version: Read chapter 5 of my book at:
> >    http://opengovdata.io/2012-02/page/5/principles-open-government-data
> >    --------------------------------------------
> >
> > So I was thinking that morning, what other word do we need to add to
> > those 3 As to work open data in there? At first I thought about adding
> > "precision". Precision is one thing we're usually asking for when we ask
> > for open data. Precision is basically granularity. Compared to say a
> > PDF, XHTML is more granular because it is explicit about section
> > boundaries, paragraphs, identifying where in the document the important
> > things are like names and dollar amounts, etc. (It is more granular with
> > respect to the meaning of the document, though not its pagination.)
> >
> > But precision is too narrow. When Congress releases its institutional
> > spending records, it does so in a PDF. That PDF has high precision ---
> > it gets down practically to line items. The problem with the PDF is that
> > it has low accuracy because getting it into a spreadsheet format and
> > de-duping names introduces errors.
> >
> > But accuracy is already one of the three As. So what's missing here?
> >
> > The Association of Computing Machinery’s Recommendation on Open
> > Government (February 2009) figured this out:
> >
> >> "Data published by the government should be in formats and approaches
> >> that promote analysis and reuse of that data."
> > http://www.acm.org/public-policy/open-government
> >
> > Not only is it right, but "analysis" starts with the letter A. Plus, in
> order to do any useful analysis on large amounts of information, we need
> automation --- another A word. That is fate if I ever saw it.
> >
> > Proposing a whole 17 distinct principles of open government data (read
> the chapter!) might be, let's say, overwhelming in any practical situation.
> If we had to do with just four words, maybe these will do:
> >
> >    accessible,
> >    authentic,
> >    accurate, and
> >    analyzable (using automation, because data is big these days).
> >
> > Analyzable gives deeper meaning to the other three words. Accuracy is
> too vague alone. You can't measure accuracy in the absence of some process.
> In the computer science world, accuracy is how often something comes out
> right. I think government documents people have considered that 'something'
> to be if a Xerox machine copies enough pixels correctly. That's not
> sufficient for analysis anymore. We can't go hiring thousands of interns to
> read all of the documents governments produce. We didn't build computers
> for nothing.
> >
> > With analyzable added, the meaning of accuracy is that an *automated
> computer process* will get it right. If someone says a document is accurate
> because it is a scan, I'll say that's what accurate meant in the 1960s. If
> the fourth "A" of government information is analyzable, we can redefine
> accuracy for 2012.
> >
> > But if you want the full 17 principles, read the rest of the chapter,
> which tackles data quality (accuracy & precision), machine processability,
> and other concepts in more detail. There's also a case study on the House
> disbursements documents, looking at whether and how it met the 17
> principles:
> >
> >    http://opengovdata.io/2012-02/page/5/principles-open-government-data
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > - Josh Tauberer (@JoshData)
> > - GovTrack.us | POPVOX.com
> >
> > http://razor.occams.info | www.govtrack.us | www.popvox.com
> >
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-- 
Best regards,
Charles
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