Comments on: Statistics, data mashing and policy making

By: Dr Alex Singleton

Dr Alex Singleton — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 16:56:21 +0000

Thanks for the mention Tom, I am glad you liked our sites, keep checking back as we have some exciting projects on the horizon!

I think a key role the government in this area is to improve dissemination of their nationally collected or funded data, specifically in those formats which are now commonly being used in these new methods of presenting spatial data.

By: Tudor Rickards

Tudor Rickards — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 07:16:42 +0000

I’m also learning less good habits like sending out stuff without checking ‘speling and style’….

By: Tudor Rickards

Tudor Rickards — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 07:14:25 +0000

Mashability.
I’ve been encouraging students to write blogs for some while. I’ll be able to use yours as an example of how blogging is becoming more pervasive and influential.

They teach me more than I teach them. I’m already accepted I’m out of date and the future lies in the hands of as generation developing ways of communicating through wikis, utube, facebook.

http://leaderswedeserve.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/blogging-can-seriously-help-your-career/

Best wishes

By: Michael Cross

Michael Cross — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:21:52 +0000

Yes! Five minutes of Rosling is worth five years of argument about inconsistencies in marginal pricing of unrefined data, wider markets, trading funds, re-use licensing etc. This is the important bit: the great ocean of truth.

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:30:45 +0000

Just a thought for you, Tom. When the government gets FOI requests, usually someone scurries around and prepares a response.
Often, the requests are for data.
Perhaps there should be some simple review process which says “can we publish this data in an open format?” For example – as an xml dump, or an xml feed.
Of course, we’re not mandating that this always be done – but it could be an easy way of providing mashable / analysable information when there’s some energy for it outside of government.
This is how most companies in the web industry provide information to customers (customers ask for a report; it’s usually as easy to automate it and provide it as a self-refreshing feed or web page as it is to generate a one-off response. The second time the customer asks for the same information, updated, the cost is zero. Of course, they don’t actually need to ask again because they’ve got it live.)

By: Data, Like Youâ€™ve Never Seen It Before : Tree of Knowledge

Data, Like Youâ€™ve Never Seen It Before : Tree of Knowledge — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:52:52 +0000

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