4iP Blog

Just read your blog post. Very interesting. It mirrors what we have been discussing and planning in Banjax - gathering, tidying and making available public data sets in a web format for others to use. We need it for Local NI. Indeed we have needed it many times in the past 12 months.

Our NI Crime Map (licensed to Belfast Telegraph http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/nicrimemap/) was an eye-opener for us. On a bureaucrat’s tick list of openness, they have done everything already.

* Is it available in digital format. Yes, excel, tick.
* Is it available to the public. Yes, one obscure website, tick. etc.

The reality is in the detail - making something available in an excel spreadsheet in an obscure corner of the web SHOULDN’T count! All public data should be in an open format, in a prominent place online, authoritative, accurate, maintained.

And we’d like to build something like that.

Are these kinds of services better provided by private (predominantly US) corporations like Amazon or publicly owned enterprises?

Thanks for the comments. Interesting and useful. Darryl, I completely agree that the long term viability of these types of data services rely on their being prominent and well maintained. Hopefully, services that look to house multiple data sets will benefit from users going there to use one data set they know about and in the process discovering additional useful data they can use.

ArkAngel, I thought about this point while I was writing the post and think about it constantly in relation to 4ip. On the one hard it would certainly be preferable to have a publicly accountable public service orientated body. However, few public bodies I’m ware of have the technical know-how and vision to deliver this.

While private enterprises tend to be commercially motivated they have a number of other advantages. Firstly, many of the commercial players in this space are multinational. I’m sure data shared across borers will yield unexpected innovations and analysis. Sure, nationally held public bodies will want to do this too but can you imagine the red tape?

Secondly, experience tells us that services improve the fastest where there is competition. Right now all all the big technology players are falling over themselves to get into the cloud. You could argue that Amazon’s public data sets are a response to that competition. Public bodies rarely tend to compete with each other and they’re often prevented from doing so (unless you work in broadcasting). Services like these are embryonic and competition might drive could drive innovation and ultimately maturity.

Dan

@ArkAngel It depends. Private companies are often more agile and resilient with things like this - they don’t have endless meetings to prevaricate about ‘solutions’ before writing up tenders and then micro managing a project to death! A good example is Google’s Patent site http://www.google.com/patents Another good example is Wikipedia - I can’t imagine that being delivered by a government department!

It all depends how they are set up and operated and to what purpose - private gain vs public good.

There’s an interesting article on this area at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cloud_computing_is_more_than_a_computer_in_the_cloud.php

Interestingly he says:

“Just as ‘we’ used to duplicate and under-utilize computational resources, so we do something very similar with our data. We expensively enter and re-enter the same facts, over and over again. We over-engineer data capture forms and schemas, making collection exorbitantly expensive, whilst often appearing to do all we can to limit opportunities for re-use. Under the all-too-easy banners of ’security’ and ‘privacy’ we secure individual data stores and fail to exploit connections with other sources, whether inside or outside the enterprise.”