[OpenSpending] Formats for government budget data?

Thu Jan 24 13:23:29 UTC 2013

Hey,

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 12:24 PM, José Félix Ontañon
<fontanon at emergya.com>wrote:

> 2013/1/24 Peter Krantz <peter at peterkrantz.se>
>
>> Hi!
>>
>> For the first time the swedish government published the data for the
>> budget in excel for 2012 [1]. As you can see the format makes it a bit
>> cumbersome to use in e.g. a tree map (I had to tweak it a lot to make
>> [2]).
>>
>> Is there any work going on to harmonize budget data publication in a
>> machine readable format?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Peter
>>
>> [1]: http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/2548/a/199285
>> [2]: http://peterkrantz.com/v11n/statsbudget-2013/
>
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> Some entities in the spanish Public Administration[1] has been publishing
> financial data using the XBRL standard.
>
> From Wikipedia's XBRL page[2]:
> XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a freely available and
> global standard for exchanging business information based on XML. XBRL
> allows the expression of semantic meaning commonly required in business
> reporting ... Early users of XBRL included regulators such as the U.S.
> Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Committee of European Banking
> Supervisors (CEBS) ...
>
> Nevertheless, I haven't found any country reporting public income/spendig
> budget using XBRL.
>

XBRL is hell to parse, especially since its just a framework in which you
place more specific taxonomies - which aren't nearly as
well standardised for government data as for business reporting. No
journalist or hackday person will use XBRL without explicit tooling, and I
haven't seen too much of that yet.

I would invite you to have a look at
http://openspending.org/resources/standard/index.html which is some specs
for plain CSV that we've been working - the goal is basically to make
something fairly expressive while still keeping it in a form that can be
used by people with limited technical skill. Maybe
http://openspending.org/resources/handbook/ch006_types-of-data.html is also
of interest - some general guidance from a CSO perspective.

Cheers,

 - Friedrich
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