Berners-Lee Calls For Government Data Transparency

eldavojohn writes "Two months ago, Tim Berners-Lee unveiled a UK Government data project with the goal to make government data more useful for everyone. Today he is calling on the rest of the world's governments to become more transparent with their nonsensitive data. After only a few months, his project boasts around forty applications for using government data (screenshot example here). The BBC article notes the interesting uses of public data in India and Brazil that are disappointingly lacking in other countries — even the United States. Hopefully the US's data.gov will evolve to hosting apps instead of just data."

TED Talk

[jduhls]

Here's his TED Talk [google.com] on the subject.

Vancouver data is open..still waiting for StatsCan

[el chief]

City of Vancouver data is open now, at: http://data.vancouver.ca/ [vancouver.ca] Still can't find a goddam list of all the buildings in Vancouver. How hard is that? Statistics Canada are still dinosaurs. They charge for access to data we paid them to collect.

Re:Binary XML (EXI)

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't just consider the format in isolation, you need to consider the application.

If we are to create, transmit and parse optimal, efficiently compressed content on the interwebz, the browsers need to be able to parse it and tools, scripting languages, etc. need to be able to read/write the format.

EXI appears to be a good solution, but there is no low cost C/C++ implementation that I am aware of.

Agile Delta (EXI inventor) have a C/C++ solution, but it's $loadsamoney.

An unrestricted (ie. not GPL or dual licensed) C/C++ reference implementation would be handy if this format is to become widely adopted.

FastInfoSet (alternative BinaryXML proposal) solutions are available at lower cost (including open source/free), but the W3C alledges that EXI is a superior format.

http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI

If anyone has the mood to port the Java EXI reference implementation to C/C++ that would move this discussion beyond chat and into a realization phase.

I'd be happy to do it, but like most of us, I'm a little busy with other work.