RE: NY Property Tax Explorer

Apologies for missing the call, again, today.

 

In my mind, we really need to say what we mean with 'best practice'. Do we
really think we can define one best practice implying that all the rest is
'bad practice'? I don't think so. What I would like to see is 'practice
related to objectives' and then try to determine what kinds of behaviour
make sense for what kinds of objectives.

 

For example, certain forms of PDF are really good if you want to enable
out-loud reading of documents for the blind, but not so good to extract
tabular information. If you want to make your tabular data useful for
applications, there are better ways to publish the data than PDF.

 

As I earlier argued for metadata best practices, I think the most useful
kind of advice should be something like: if you want to do A, then if you
publish data as X you will have the following advantages and disadvantages,
and you should really consider format Y to increase usefulness of your data.

 

Makx.

 

 

De: Steven Adler [mailto:adler1@us.ibm.com] 
Enviado el: 27 March 2015 15:41
Para: Bart van Leeuwen
CC: DWBP WG
Asunto: Re: NY Property Tax Explorer

 

Bart,

A PDF might not conform to your definition of a best practice, but NYC is
publishing tens of thousands of PDF's that describe property taxes,
hospitals, crime reports, and housing inspections.

My point is that if we restrict our recommendations of best practices to
only conform to what we define as the best file types, we are deliberately
limiting the relevance of our work in the real world.





Best Regards,

Steve

Motto: "Do First, Think, Do it Again"

Bart van Leeuwen ---03/27/2015 10:35:44 AM---I think we try to assemble a
'best practice' with this working group. I sincerely hope you don't con




From:


Bart van Leeuwen < <mailto:bart_van_leeuwen@netage.nl>
bart_van_leeuwen@netage.nl>




To:


Steven Adler/Somers/IBM@IBMUS




Cc:


"DWBP WG" < <mailto:public-dwbp-wg@w3.org> public-dwbp-wg@w3.org>




Date:


03/27/2015 10:35 AM




Subject:


Re: NY Property Tax Explorer

  _____  




I think we try to assemble a 'best practice' with this working group. 
I sincerely hope you don't consider data published in a PDF to conform to
this best practice. 

I'm not arguing that it is possible to get usable data from these formats,
but they were not intended to carry data in a machine readable way. 

Bart 

Steven Adler <adler1@us.ibm.com <mailto:adler1@us.ibm.com> > wrote on
27-03-2015 15:09:32:

> From: Steven Adler <adler1@us.ibm.com <mailto:adler1@us.ibm.com> > 
> To: "DWBP WG" <public-dwbp-wg@w3.org <mailto:public-dwbp-wg@w3.org> > 
> Date: 27-03-2015 15:10 
> Subject: NY Property Tax Explorer 
> 
> You may recall I submitted a use case about this example from NYC 
> last year.  The developer, Chris Wong, who works for Socrata, wrote 
> a Ruby routine to scrape 1000 PDF files for property tax data to 
> fill out this map app:
> 
>  <http://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/track/issues/56>
http://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/track/issues/56
> 
> Chris is a self-taught developer, by no means a pro.  I think this 
> story well demonstrates that Data on the Web today is quite 
> innovative and PDF, JPG, AVI, MP3, and MP4 are commonly machine readable.

> 
> Restricting our recommendations to file formats that conform only 
> those covered by W3C WG's (JSON, CSV, RDF, etc) ignores the reality 
> of how Open Data is published and used.
> 
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Steve
> 
> Motto: "Do First, Think, Do it Again"