The launch of the International Open Data Charter in New York is a welcome step forward for the data management community as well as everyone concerned with the open data movement. This is the first time we've seen a proposed data standards approach for everything and everywhere – that is, an attempt to enable data access across existing boundaries.
Also, as Bill Anderson says in his report on the Charter: “the inclusion of the principle of 'Comparability and Interoperability' [is] the first time that a charter like this has moved beyond transparency to properly consider the whole point of open data: usage. Most datasets are pretty meaningless on their own. It is only when they are combined and contextualized do they generally make sense. Joined-up data creates the information we need.”
There's long been a problem in the field of open data around the idea that just publishing something is good enough. It's finally getting through to more people that open data needs to be usable – and that means it must conform to some declared set of data definitions. Open Data
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