RE: NY Property Tax Explorer

Hoi,

We are not writing a document that describes how people publish and consume
open data, we are writing guidelines on how they can best do it.

The concept of "best" is obviously subjective but I hope we can at list
agree on some points.

I was recently sitting with people dealing with crisis. They need a lot of
data and when asking for it they sometimes get a PDF with a picture of a
hand written table in it. According to the publisher this is good open
data. Is it really so? The consumers spent a lot of time extracting the
data from it...

Our document could help there by letting the consumers having something to
help arguing with the publisher and hopefully get something more usable.

As for every best practices, there is no guarantee ours will be followed
but having somewhere an officially endorsed way of publishing good open
data will surely be welcomed by many data publishers and consumers.

Cheers,
Christophe

--
Sent with difficulties. Sorry for the brievety and typos...
Op 27 mrt. 2015 16:19 schreef "Makx Dekkers" <mail@makxdekkers.com>:

> 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"
>
> [image: Inactive hide details for Bart van Leeuwen ---03/27/2015 10:35:44
> AM---I think we try to assemble a 'best practice' with this w]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 <bart_van_leeuwen@netage.nl>
>
> To:
>
>
> Steven Adler/Somers/IBM@IBMUS
>
> Cc:
>
>
> "DWBP WG" <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> wrote on 27-03-2015 15:09:32:
>
> > From: Steven Adler <adler1@us.ibm.com>
> > To: "DWBP WG" <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
> >
> > 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"
>