A question posted recently on Quora asked:
“If you were making a bill about open data for a local government, what sort of specifications and formats would you include in the bill?”
Read Alan Morrison‘s response below:
A great long-term goal is Linked Open Data rated at five stars. (http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/L...) You can start with focusing on a one-star rating, but it’s best to keep in mind the five-star goal and steady progress to five stars over the next decade.
You’re right to discincentivize formats that don’t allow granular linking and encourage formats that enable machine readability.
Governments who are already plugged into this issue (such as the US, UK and other EC governments) are clearing a path toward a full semantic layer, conformance with Linked Open Data principles and machine readability over the next decade. There’s been a very large investment in Linked Open Data by these governments and the Linked Data community that will help you clear the path in your own organization. Best to build on that foundation.
It’s good to start small now, but with an eye toward being able to query across data silos with SPARQL or another comparable standards-based graph query tool and enable dynamic datasets. Favored formats would be RDF or JSON-LD. Also consider related W3C/schema.org/HTML5-complaintmetadata/ontology standards such as OWL. Look toward standardizing on a W3C-compliant graph data architecture and the ability to convert all input files so they become part of a linked open data graph. The large-scale graph integration will require ontologies.
If the point is to make the data fully accessible, the long-term goal is an articulated, open, standards-based graph. Other architectures don’t have the contextual richness of large, standards-based graphs. The Linked Data cloud is what serves this purpose in 2012. (http://linkeddata.org/) Full accessilbility in an environment rife with information overload hinges on a) sufficient human curation and b) machines learning enough about the data and users to serve up relevant answers or results to those users.
Update: The Data Transparency Coalition is behind a bill sponsored by US Senators Warner, Issa and Portman called the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act), which focuses on open Federal spending data. That bill passed the House in April 2011 and was reintroduced in the Senate in September 2012. See http://www.datacoalition.com/con....
The City of San Francisco’s recently published open data policy includes umbrella verbiage about most desired formats and describes the role of Chief Data Officer: http://innovation.sfgov.org/open...