I’m not sure how silly this is going to stike you. I have this problem in not being able to dstinguish betwen what is happening in the Open Governmental Data area (.gov) and what has been happening for the past 10 years in Open Educational Resources (.edu). Can you explain the differences?

I like the rightt0know conference. Can you tell us the url for where you’re streaming and recording it, and taking questions and comments?

Lastly, could you explain the title “interim commissioner”?

Kerry makes an excellent point. Data needs to be understood and that requires meta data which must also include “how the data came into existence”, “a measure of trust in the accuracy”, “who is permitted to access the data”, “who is permitted to modify it”, etc.

When government data is released the answers to these meaning and meta questions are implied by the fact that it has been released by a known government body. For government data to be released “electronically” rules and information that can be embodied in meta data or by the fact it can be seen must be established so that the trust can be maintained.

Perhaps there needs to be another law that tries to encapsulate this. Maybe something like

“Only data that can be understood and trusted should be open” or in the words of David Eaves
“Only data that can be understood and trusted should exist”

# Make use of clear and logical metadata such as Title, Description and Canonical tags to ensure that both search engines and your prospective searchers can make sense of the results. Nothing worse than publishing a record with an HTML title like “32432-43A”. Nobody is going to click on that!

Dedicated ‘vertical search’ providers (not unlike those provided by ASDD) then have a chance to slice and dice a data registry in several meaningful ways. Publishing a dataset’s metadata in a structured, standardised fashion on the web could conceivably allow anyone to create a ‘dataset search’ engine to answer queries such as:

“Find me a crime-themed dataset for my new suburb from the last 2 years.”

Of course, within the metadata (or landing page for that dataset), a link to that dataset’s “More Documentation” / “More Metadata” / “Data Dictionary” resource would be enormously valuable, once you’ve determined that a given set is suitable to your requirements.

An Excel spreadsheet with no documentation but column headings may meet all the criteria, but it’s essentially unusable.