All Comments
Comments on the Book
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2.1 - File Formats (3 comments)
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A wonderful job. Super hepfull information.
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General Comments (1 comment)
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Data needs community. OpenStreetMap shows this clearly, without thousands of people updating and using the data, providing support and advocating, the OSM data set would fade. The DC app contest successfully brought a community together around a data release that could’ve gone unnoticed … of course us data geeks would’ve known, but the impact and potential is known when the community base is wide. This is the same reason why we’re staying in Kenya for another six months … we want to make sure the community around Map Kibera [http://mapkibera.org] is sustainable.
So I think this is a major missing piece in development generally, and not something the Unlocking Aid Information paper highlights. So my suggestion would be to add a 4th recommendation to this effect.
Nat Torkington wrote up a solid piece that makes a similar case. http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/02/rethinking-open-data.html
-Mikel
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1.2 - Legal mechanisms for allowing information to be re-used (1 comment)
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Trying to use Open Source licenses interoperably has been surprisingly difficult — by default, everything ends up under the terms of the most restrictive (or worse, the union of all the restrictions). I’d suggest choosing a single license for all data, rather than trying to come up with a family of interoperable licenses.
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3.2 - A registry of aid information (1 comment)
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My wife will get angry if she hears this.
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Appendix II: Existing examples of aid information (1 comment)
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Never would have thunk I would find this so indispenbsale.
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Comments on the Blog
I think that the format recommendation ought be oriented exclusively to the XML-based file formats.
It is the usual format used to interchange data and it guarantees the absolute precision about the position of one piece of information in the structure of the document. Something than can fails in the case of TXT or CSV (for example with characters unexpected) apart from the difficulty to define validators to these formats.
Besides, this option offers the extense XML-related specifications to process the data: XLink, XQuery, XLS and Schemas, for example.
Interoperability, probably the most valuable and final goal, runs usually very close to XML because it is the faster format to locate information independently of the data source, application or system.
The XML with XSLT templates, to create HTML, would solve the human-readable aspect.