[open-government] More than eightly formats for open government data

[Jose M. Alonso]

El 10/09/2012, a las 15:45, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou escribió:
> ISO standard does not mean open.

Can you elaborate? I'm curious as many governments consider them as such.

> One simple rule to determine openness
> IMHO should be : public specs + non-proprietary, therefore not OOXML,
> as it was perfeclty exposed into the open standard definition proposed
> by the European commission
> <http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/3761/5845.html>.

I don't think there's such a thing as a simple rule to determine open as it means many different things to many people.
I'm glad you refer to that document as I remember the long discussions about the inclusion of the "...or at a nominal charge..." text in the past.

As Stef said, I was wrong as he didn't mentioned it was closed. I apologize. I tend to believe he will agree with me on my take on open as he mentioned "...openness is not an absolute as you suggest." Not that I was trying to suggest that (as I'm stating here) but that an ISO-stamped standard was open enough for me.


> Benjamin
> 
> PS: >> and can we stop calling xlsx a closed format, please?
> Can we please take a look at this and find answers to why in hell we
> would want to use a format that destroys the quality of the data
> anyway ?
> http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.fr/

Well, IMHO, it's not about the format but about the tools and about the different needs of different users and need of capacity building.
I think that one of the really big issues with open standards is that the end user factor has not been properly considered. Non-technical end users (not fully sure how to call this group so you get my point and I'm inclusive enough) use tools such as MS Office and produce files in formats like XLSX (well, XLS most of the time).
Trying to enforce different tools and approaches usually does not work (good examples exist though), and I'd say that the most successful OD projects have faced the issue by adapting to it (e.g. building conversion tools), trying to improve the format itself (e.g. for it to become an open standard), and trying to improve its implementation when possible.

Josema.


> On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 1:23 PM, stef <s at ctrlc.hu> wrote:
>> On Sun, Sep 09, 2012 at 08:24:35PM +0200, Jose M. Alonso wrote:
>>>> talking about formats, can anyone please liberate the data from excel to some less closed format.
>>> 
>>> and can we stop calling xlsx a closed format, please?
>> 
>> please read my statement again, i called for a less closed format, which is a
>> relative thing. but i admit using the wording "more interoperable" would have
>> been better, the word "open" is tainted too much anyway.
>> 
>> i am unaware of any successful plugfests where diverse set of industry
>> offerings have shown that OOXML offerings are indeed interoperable.
>> 
>> openness is not an absolute as you suggest. a good guideline to measure
>> the relative openness of a standards has been developed by Ken Krechmer:
>> http://www.csrstds.com/openstds.html
>> 
>> according to this scale OOXML is not very open.
>> 
>>> Not that I'm a big fan of how OOXML [1] was standardized but it's an ECMA and ISO standard, i.e. open enough.
>> 
>> that only means it has been rubberstamped, i wouldn't call open when some
>> wealthy individual/corporation buys himself a standard.
>> 
>> stefan marsiske
>> Open Standards Alliance
>> Vice-President - Infrastucture.
>> 
>> --
>> gpg: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/stef.gpg
>> gpg fp: F617 AC77 6E86 5830 08B8  BB96 E7A4 C6CF A84A 7140
>> otr fp: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/otr.txt
>> 
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