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

[Daniel Dietrich]

+1 for a meetup on this at OKFest. I think there is a open space for spontaneous meetups. 

Daniel

On 11 Sep 2012, at 14:03, Jose M. Alonso wrote:

> Benjamin, I think you'll attend the OKFestival next week. If so, I propose to take this offline and discuss there as this is becoming too long and deep for me right now but too interesting to let it go. If others are interested, we might hold a small group discussion over lunch or dinner on one of those days not only on whether an ISO standard is open or not (not so interesting) but on what a good open data standards menu should look alike, based on Neeta's original email.
> 
> Josema.
> 
> 
> El 11/09/2012, a las 11:40, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou escribió:
>>> Can you elaborate? I'm curious as many governments consider them as such.
>> 
>> Like I said, the european commission epxlained it very well in its
>> document : a standard should be considered open if "The standard is
>> adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation".
>> Which is obviously not the case for any proprietary format such as
>> OOXML
>> Remember when Microsoft attacked OpenOffice for using their formats in
>> spite of their promise...
>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> But opendata does not aim at providing the data to the end users
>> directly but to the people able to make it
>> presentable/usable/understandable by the end users, and they never
>> want to use these tools, even though they are regularily
>> This is the whole point of doing open data advocacy to make sure that
>> public available data actually directly reusable by people such as our
>> projects. Right now we have to adapt, if we do advocacy, it's not so
>> that this continues forever! So publishing in excel should IMHO never
>> be acclaimed and always be reminded that exporting as csv first should
>> be the rule. Remember CSV can always be opened be end users in excel
>> if they really want to
>> 
>> Benjamin
>> 
>>> 
>>> 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
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> open-government mailing list
>>>>> open-government at lists.okfn.org
>>>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
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