Great post on freeing Govt data
Having just been through the process of obtaining and publishing some Government data, I was interested to see Dennis McDonald covering an Australian blog post on eGovernment on ‘Making data freely available‘.
Craig makes some very good points in his conclusions, and I’ve got one that I would like to add based on recent experience with the State Highway trackpoint data I sourced in NZ and uploaded to OpenStreetMap.
In the followup to uploading the trackpoints to OSM, a group of NZ OSM mappers have been discussing how to classify roads in New Zealand – basically how the road hierarchy is classified. Turns out that this is a hard problem and there is not a single standardised approach taken to classifying roads in New Zealand. After asking for guidance, I became aware of a number of issues and capture these on the gis.org.nz wiki.
The simple fact was that there was not a nationally consistent approach to classifying the road hierarchy in New Zealand. I expect it is similar in Australia, and possibly worse with the additional layer of State government.
This highlights an additional key role that I think Government has to play in national data collection.
Government should set the standards for data collection to ensure that datasets are nationally consistent to enable simple aggregation of disparate datasets.
It doesn’t have to actually perform the aggregation, although that would be nice. It just has to ensure that standards are used to enabled aggregation. Using the road hierarchy classification example from above, this means that a road of a certain class in one part of the country, means exactly the same in another. This would probably occur by an engagement-based approach that determines a controlled vocabulary to define types of roads.
Without this responsibility, citizens are doomed to a million-and-one datasets that cannot be easily aggregated to produce coherent and consistent national datasets.