Free Data Re: The Weather Forecaster's Dilemma and GLD

Making Government Linked Data transparently "just happen" is going to be hard.  I made a MYSQL data base which I believe is agnostic and transparent in the eGov space.  The keys (vkey table) are searchable URI's of the form www.data.gov.{ISO 3166 Country Code}/.

data.gov/539/ is a synonym for "data.gov.us" (US=539 base 26).  For the US, interpolated coordinates were available by County, so bounding boxes were calculated (state_box, county_box) and comparable data filled in for American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.  Don't use the coordinates to draw maps, since they are an abstraction.  It might be better to scale these 0-100% so as not to confuse.


The rest of the world is a bit easier.  In the main, they use www.data.gov.xx/ notation, but ISO 3166 does include some dependencies as peers, so that two tables are necessary for subdivisions (top_domains, sub_domains) which are "states" and "counties".  Metropolitan France (FX) includes the actual places, and "Great Britain" (GB), although not a Web domain, includes similar actual places in the "metropolitan" UK e.g. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Pretabulated lists are given for 1) EU Members, 2) UN Members, 3) WIPO Members and 4) UN/CLOS Signatories.  These are pretty ugly, to be blunt.  The EU's 27 Members have over a thousand parts.

I'm sure "Big Data" has all this figured out.  Still, if you want to poke around for yourself, this is for you.  BTW Have the minutes of the last eGOV Conference Call been posted ?  When I lived in NYC, Albany had no "Like" button"; but it would have been pressed several times a month by mistake if it did.  Have things changed ?

(ZIP File)  http://www.rustprivacy.org/2012/cctld/domain_identifiers_2012_06-01.zip

--Gannon



________________________________
 From: Gannon Dick <gannon_dick@yahoo.com>
To: John Erickson <olyerickson@gmail.com>; "public-egov-ig@w3.org" <public-egov-ig@w3.org> 
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2012 10:33 AM
Subject: Re: The Weather Forecaster's Dilemma and GLD
 

I was working on this before/as I learned of Mr. Hayes' resignation.  There are some uniquely American facets to that without any bearing on GLD.  There is however a general problem lurking underneath.


America encounters this problem with URI's for Counties, that is, subdivisions of states.  There are some statistics which cannot be compiled per capita - or per mobile device from above. That does not mean you cannot have weather on a mobile device, it means that the current location of the mobile device is irrelevant.   In the case where services, like weather, are provisioned for territorial subdivisions,  the answers provided by Linked Data queries fall out of domain, not only out of range.  "What is the Temperature in Wisconsin?" is an answerable, but not terribly useful question.  In practice, this is not allowed to happen - the commercial weather services use the National Weather Service as an original source.  That is an externality which allows Linked Data to "just happen".

EU will run into the same problem, although since the "Federal Territory" of the EU is limited to a few locations it will be something they feel more than something they see.  Pretty much what Phil Archer was saying a few weeks ago.  If the EU wanted to make Bavaria an "EU National Park" the first the Bavarians would complain there are not enough Beer Gardens, the Berliners would complain that the Bavarians always get the good recreational facilities.  Somewhere in the news cycle the German Government will tell the EU to stop that nonsense too, but if Linked Data "just happens" the confusion will be as small as possible.

The EU, UN, WIPO Members, CLOS Signatories and (none of the above) are all generic Top Level Domains.   The concern for persistence of subdivision identifiers is unique to Country Coded Top Level Domains - Government Data - and Governance. 

--Gannon



________________________________
 From: John Erickson <olyerickson@gmail.com>
To: "public-egov-ig@w3.org" <public-egov-ig@w3.org> 
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2012 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: The Weather Forecaster's Dilemma and GLD
 
Sorry: I'm having a hard time understanding the relevance of this.
I've read (or tried to) the attached PDFs and have taken the time to
read about Jack Hayes' resignation (cf <http://nyti.ms/KZm42q>
<http://bit.ly/KZm2Yv> <http://huff.to/JP41mf> etc) and still can't
see the connection to W3C eGov...

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 5:29 PM, Gannon Dick <gannon_dick@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Last Friday, the head of the National Weather Service lost his job.  I don't
> know him, never met him.  The allegation was that he was diverting funds
> between projects against the expressed wishes of Congress.  There was no
> suggestion of corruption, he was moving funds around to support his vision
> of the mission.
>
> It would seem to me a good time for those of us who want to do Linked
 Data
> right to step up, not necessarily with a defense, but at least with an
> explanation of the circumstances and scientific motivation he may have had.
> RDF did not get him sacked, but a misunderstanding of RDF helped, or to put
> it a different way, Linked Data integrity and Scientific integrity are
> close, but not quite the owl:same thing[1,2].   The US Congress's accounting
> for the Public Domain (56 Classes) [3] is incompatible with a Linked Data
> Identifier view (218 distinct Classes) [4].  Nevada has a large percentage
> of Federal Territory, so naturally a large percentage of the weather
> forecasting costs are for the "Federal Government good".  Ouch.
>
> I wouldn't want to put the GLD Chairs, DATA.GOV or NASA on the spot, but if
> there was a time to talk; now is it.  It would be a shame to
 perpetuate "The
> Weather Forecaster's Dilemma" by silence.  Or you can tell me to shut up and
> sit down because I'm wrong, but hopefully somebody would make you prove it
> :o)
>
> --Gannon
>
> [1] http://www.rustprivacy.org/2012/cctld/weathermans-dilemma.pdf
> [2] http://www.rustprivacy.org/2012/cctld/weathermans-dilemma-classes.pdf
> [3] http://www.rustprivacy.org/2012/cctld/US-by-CountyOne.xhtml
> [4] http://www.rustprivacy.org/2012/cctld/US-by-CountyTwo.xhtml
>
>
>
>



-- 
John S. Erickson, Ph.D.
Director, Web Science Operations
Tetherless World Constellation (RPI)
<http://tw.rpi.edu> <olyerickson@gmail.com>
Twitter & Skype: olyerickson