[OpenSpending] messages about standards

[Friedrich Lindenberg]

Hi Gisele,

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 11:36 PM, Gisele S. Craveiro
<gisele.craveiro at gmail.com> wrote:
>> sorry for the lag in my response,
>>
>> I decided to turn this into a web
>> site first.
>
>
> Fantastic! As your last two messages came with lots of info
> (some unkown for me) I am trying to understand the whole
> scenario.
>
>>
>> So here's my current thinking on the spending standard -
>> basically a complete copy of the GTFS standard adapted for
>> transactional expenditure.
>>
>> http://openspending.org/resources/standard/technical.html
>
>
> Technically I think it is very good, but I have some doubts about
> political acceptance. I eager to hear you about this (conf. on Oct 11)

Interesting - would you like to elaborate those? My current feeling is
that there are still few political considerations to the format
selection, both XML (http://iatiregistry.org/dataset) and CSV
(http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/agencies) seem to have seen
widespread adoption, even on a global municipal level.

>>
>>
>> Please let me know what you think about this!
>
>
> As I said before, I am still trying to understand your proposal e
> some political/technical/social implications.
>
> Do you know Martin Murilo´s work?
> www.w3.org/2012/06/pmod/pmod2012_submission_18.pdf

I hadn't seen it but it captures a concern that I often have (and,
luckily, I think it is also often expressed in the wider open data
community). My immediate question is more practical: what are the
technical constraints we need to impose on ourselves so that the
released data can be evaluated by users with less technical skill (say
journos or CSO folks), while not unnecessarily limiting its
expressiveness for advanced use cases.

> I was thinking about our last conversation: the compromise between
> semantic power (linked data, xbrl, xml) and ease of use (consequently
> the users base number).
> It is a very tricky question and I am just trying to understand it.
> Could you give more elements?

I'm afraid I don't have the answer. XBRL just scares the living
daylight out of me by consistently doing the politically right thing
while ignoring usability - there may be good tooling around it though,
I haven't explored. In any case, from what I could find on the web,
the "General Ledger" extension which would be able to begin expressing
transactional data is still much more in a discussion stage rather
than being developed and used.

As for the others: XML and CSV seem very realistic for me, both have
great tooling and are widely used. Linked Data is something that I
have a personal problem with. It would be interesting to survey other
data consumers, it seems to me like LD is mostly a proposition made by
data publishers with fewer people actually wanting to use it.

Let me know what you think and these technical questions and whether
there are any docs from your team that we should read to catch up
(happy to gtranslate!)

Cheers,

 - Friedrich