Data.gov Geo Viewer: Lipstick on a pig?

July 27, 2010 17 Comments

So with great interest I read Marten’s blog post on the new Data.gov “Geo Viewer”.  Marten’s got a ton of reasons why its great and why it fails, but for me it didn’t work at all.  I just get this FAIL message below:

I mean maybe I could figure out what went wrong, but since Data.gov gives me no details about datasets I just move on.

Of course it could be one of the many problems Marten showcases, but I will say the “share this” works great.  In all seriousness putting a “preview” map on Data.gov isn’t going to change a thing about how worthless Data.gov is for actually finding data.  You can of course put your comment in the little box at Data.gov and I’m sure they’ll forward it on to “top men”.

Of course this brings up a huge point with how big a failure Data.gov has been.  Just going to the “Ideas” page for Data.gov, you are presented with a big middle finger.

What would I like Data.gov to look like in July 2010?  No really, I totally trust the government to do right by data.  Nothing says that nobody from the Data.gov crew looks at that Ideas page more than that simple statement.  Rather, it is more of an exercise to make citizens feel part of the process, distracting them from actually doing something about it.  Maybe it would be better to just go through ESRI to get things fixed.

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Government Open Data Updates

January 21, 2010 9 Comments

Despite some speed humps, many cities and governments are going full speed ahead with opening their data. One of the biggest is the City of Vancouver’s  Open Data Catalogue (note the copy and paste spelling of catalog, those wacky Canadians).  Well they’ve launched a new update that simplifies the process of navigating the data.  Every time I stop by I see more and more data available in more formats.  I think the city should be commended for their embracing open data sharing with citizens.

The other open data update is the data.gov.uk website.  The search is less than useful as you can’t perform advanced searches.  Sean Gorman did a quick look and didn’t find any specific geo datasets, but I’m sure we’ll start seeing them.  One thing that didn’t surprise me was the presence of SPARQL.  Why data.gov.uk would put such an annoying query language front and center is beyond me.  But with Sir  Tim Berners-Lee as and advisor I can only imagine that he pushed hard for its placement.  (note I’m not a big fan of RDF so take that as you will).  Still it is good to see the UK start working hard at sharing public data with everyone.

I wasn’t in Britain for the announcement of data.gov.uk, but I can only imagine it went something like this….

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