[open-government] OGD principles : Completeness versus Primacy

Mon Feb 4 23:27:58 UTC 2013

On 02/04/2013 09:14 AM, Antoine Logean wrote:
>
> Completeness can be expressed in two directions:
>
>   * "horizontal" completeness: all public data are made available from
>     any public topics (health, education, finance, …)
>   * "vertical" completeness: for a given public topic, all data
>     relative to this topic are available
>

Antoine-

Your division between horizontal and vertical completeness is a very 
helpful way of looking at things. I think this close to what we meant by 
complete and primary when the 8 OGD principles were being written. 
Completeness emphasizes the horizontal aspect, that a dataset isn't open 
(per se) if parts have been left out. The primary principle emphasizes 
that the data isn't open if it is made available only in summary, 
aggregate, or low-resolution (video) --- basically, alterations are not 
allowed.

I haven't found either of these principles very useful, though. In my 
book (opengovdata.io), I left out completeness entirely.

On 02/04/2013 11:14 AM, Muchiri Nyaggah wrote:
> What would probably help is the inclusion in (2) of the word 'Public' 
> at the beginning so that it reads "Public data..."

Just to clarify, the 8 OGD principles aren't a manifesto of what 
governments should do. When it says "Data Must Be Timely," it isn't 
suggesting that all data be timely. It's meant to be read as a 
definition of what it means to be open government data. That is, for 
data to be considered OGD it must be timely.

So in this way, there is no tension between the 8 OGD principles and 
privacy (or between the OKFN's OKD and privacy, for that matter). Data 
that is withheld for privacy reasons is withheld because it is not 
supposed to be open government data, so the 8 principles do not apply.

To respond to Jason's original question, I would say that the people 
with expertise to write good OGD principles may not be the ones with the 
expertise to write good privacy principles. That probably explains why 
the OGD community hasn't addressed that issue yet.

- Josh Tauberer (@JoshData)

http://razor.occams.info

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