[TriZPUG] Open Data and Last Night's Project Night

[Chris Calloway]

On 6/13/2013 10:47 PM, Eric Leary wrote:
> I didn't know Jason Hare was a
> "Python" guy.

Plone guy even. The man behind http://data.raleighnc.gov/ . Soon to be 
rejoining our email list.

> Geospatial is really a driver of this whole open data movement.

Yeah, this is kinda unfortunate. Because the key to making more data 
open is to make it not personally identifiable. And location is often a 
part of personally identifiable, or the part that makes the data 
interesting.

Like when were were talking about voting data. It doesn't help to take 
the address on a voting record and reduce it down to just "Carrboro." 
The fact that the voting data show what street and neighborhood the data 
comes from is what makes it useful. And once I know the street or even 
the neighborhood, there are ways I can reverse engineer the personally 
identifiable part if I don't have it.

And when you look at a lot of open data visualizations, they are all 
about the map, especially heat maps.

So there are a lot of open data tools like pycsw that assume I have 
location data, and are only very useful if I have location data. When in 
reality, there's a lot of data that would be useful to open up that has 
nothing to do with location.

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway http://nccoos.org/Members/cbc
office: 3313 Venable Hall   phone: (919) 599-3530
mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599