Byline: gnat
The Department of Internal Affairs today unveiled data.govt.nz, the portal to New Zealand machine-readable information. I worked with them as they developed it, and now it’s shipped I’d like to give them kudos for a job well done. Here are some salient points:
- the focus is on machine-readable information that is readily reusable. They don’t list PDFs, which is a wise move as data can’t readily be extracted from PDFs to be reused. They do list tables of data in HTML files, a decision that I don’t agree with but respect their right to make. The emphasis overall is on CSV, XML, and other open data formats, which is exactly where it should be.
- they take submissions from third parties. The big trap in government is to believe that everything must come from within. Our Open Data Catalogue showed that this is a great opportunity to crowdsource and they seized it.
- they take comments from users. Again, they’ve resisted the temptation to turn the official responsible for a dataset into the bottleneck for all information about that dataset. Instead the users of the dataset can help each other, ask questions of the creator, etc.
How well does the official portal do against Open New Zealand’s requirements?
- Collaborative: I believe that they aggregate from the Open New Zealand catalogue. ✔
- Open: They do not offer bulk download of their database yet. ✘
- Open Source: They’re built on open source, but their code is not itself open sourced (yet). ½✔
- Inclusive: I see statistical profiles of councils but it is listed as maintained by Internal Affairs. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating: do they accept submissions of CRI or open local body data? ?
- Conversational: They take and encourage comments. ✔
- Internally Useful: You can’t yet browse by agency or get a feed by agency. ✘
- RESTian: URLs are programmable, though not as hierarchical as we’d like (e.g., /dia/7). ½✔
- Extensible: It is not possible to add domain-specific metadata (e.g., geographic datasets have special needs). ✘
- Open standards based: They use CC licenses, but not standard dictionaries. On the plus side, it doesn’t use proprietary formats or protocols to restrict access. ½✔
Not bad for the first release. I think that this will be one of those “release early, release often” projects we’ve been saying that government should do more of. I believe that bulk download, geo-metadata, and open source are on the work program.
It’s clear that the work Open New Zealand did in preparing the requirements for data.govt.nz has paid off. Well done, everyone who participated in that. It’s a great example of government working with, not against, citizens.