[OpenSpending] messages about standards

Fri Oct 5 21:05:01 UTC 2012

CSV is certainly a good choice. I was just curious if there were particular problems you had with RDF. I'm familiar enough with the usual reasons for not using RDF that we don't need to rehash them here :)

I'd agree that having one canonical file format is best. If people want to use a different format, I'm sure the tools to convert from CSV to their favorite format will emerge. My only concern in that respect is to at least be a part of the conversations around alternative formats (including scary formats like XBRL), which you've listed on the related initiatives page: http://openspending.org/resources/standard/related.html The idea being to align your schema as much as possible with others', without sacrificing your own initiative's priorities.

On 2012-10-05, at 3:54 PM, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:

> Hi James,
> 
> On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 5:20 PM, James McKinney <james at opennorth.ca> wrote:
>> On 2012-10-05, at 10:08 AM, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> 
>> Could you expand on your problems with linked data (by which we mean RDF, I
>> assume)?
> 
> I'd prefer to avoid this: while I love a good RDF flame war it's
> likely to derail this debate. Still, if you know data end-users
> (developers, analysts, journalists) who would really want an RDF file
> over JSON/XML/CSV to get their job done, I'd be very keen to learn
> about them and the way they do things.
> 
>> In general, there should be a preference to publishing the same data in a
>> variety of formats. For geospatial, I know many governments publish in both
>> shapefile and KML. Shapefile is favored by the GIS crowd, whereas KML is
>> often the format sought by web developers. CSV is the most accessible
>> structured format. I wouldn't put (the XML serialization of) RDF that far
>> behind XML in terms of complexity.
> 
> Don't get me wrong: I don't want to stop anyone from using their
> favorite file format.
> 
> But to me it feels like a good standard is something that can actually
> be consumed by a reasonably small application. In fact, the whole
> point of standardising something seems to me about reducing options
> (and therefore complexity). If you allow data to both be expressed in
> formats A and B, you end up with two options: either you allow people
> to publish one format and not the other - then your consumer has to
> support both - or you mandate that both formats must always be
> produced - then your producer is going to be more complex than
> necessary.
> 
> All of this comes, in my opinion, on top of one fairly simple
> observation: that there is really nothing wrong with CSV for
> transactional data. Sure, it isn't typed and people often don't really
> do CSV when they say CSV - but we can fix typing in the spec and for
> CSV parsing there is just a truckload of great tooling. The fact that
> non-techies can open it in one of the four computer programs they
> vaguely know how to use just adds extra sweetness to this.
> 
> So: sorry about the RDF flame-bait and keen to hear your opinions :)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> - Friedrich
> 
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