RE: Report on Best Practices for PDF and Data

There was a ton of feedback in twitter, several blog posts, and invitations to
join the group. There’s a lot of concern that the report will be used to
justify practices that it doesn’t explicitly condemn. The “star” ratings
seem to cause more problems than they cure.

And there are several concerns (about security, redaction, review)
that give pause to the wholesale recommendation of PDF attachments.

I’m optimistic still we can work together to create a consensus
document as a Report from the community and be inclusive.

Perhaps a meeting soon?

Larry
--
http://LarryMasinter.net




From: Olivier Thereaux [mailto:ot@theodi.org]
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2017 6:41 AM
To: public-pdf-open-data@w3.org
Subject: Report on Best Practices for PDF and Data

Hi everyone - I have recently joined this CG as part of my role as Head of Technology at the Open Data Institute (ODI). We may have crossed paths in the past, as some of my past lives include a decade and a half as W3C staff and as Advisory Committee rep for the BBC.

Beyond saying hello, I wanted to get the group’s attention on a report which my colleague Tom Forth published on the CG’s web space yesterday: https://www.w3.org/community/pdf-open-data/odi-report-best-practices-for-pdf-and-data/


Working in collaboration with Adobe, we have been exploring “how PDF can play nicely with data”. The goal was to document when and how PDF could be used to solve real problems, and indeed document when that might be a bad idea. The research looked especially at the ability of the PDF open standard to include attachments, especially through the practical use case of planning data - resulting in publishing examples of three-star open data in PDF format.

If you’d like to read more about the project, John Jolliffe in the Adobe Policy team has written a blog post explaining a little more about it: http://blogs.adobe.com/policy/2017/10/16/open-data-institute-study-shows-role-for-pdf-with-open-data/


It would be great to hear feedback from this group on the report and the ideas it explores - whether you know of similar use cases as the one explored in the report, for instance.

Many thanks,
Olivier

—
Olivier Thereaux - Head of Technology
Open Data Institute - @ODIHQ