Group items tagged

"Open Government Data Principles Government data shall be considered open if it is made public in a way that complies with the principles below: 1. Complete All public data is made available. Public data is data that is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations. 2. Primary Data is as collected at the source, with the highest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms. 3. Timely Data is made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data. 4. Accessible Data is available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes. 5. Machine processable Data is reasonably structured to allow automated processing. 6. Non-discriminatory Data is available to anyone, with no requirement of registration. 7. Non-proprietary Data is available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control. 8. License-free Data is not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed."

"The Three Laws of Open Government Data: 1. If it can't be spidered or indexed, it doesn't exist 2. If it isn't available in open and machine readable format, it can't engage 3. If a legal framework doesn't allow it to be repurposed, it doesn't empower"

"Open source software developers have a powerful set of tools to make distributed authoring of software possible: diff to identify what's changed, patch to apply those changes elsewhere, version control to track changes over time and show provenance. Patch management would be just as important in a collaborative open data project, where users and other researchers might be submitting new or revised data. What would git for data look like? Heck, what would a local branch look like? I have a new attribute, you have a different projection, she has new rows, how does this all tie back together? (I eagerly await claims that RDF will solve this problem and all others) That's just development. The interface between developers and users is the release. State of the art for a lot of government data is the equivalent of source.tar.gz. No version numbers, much the ability to download older versions of the datasets or separate stable and development branches. Why would we want to download the historic version of a dataset? Because a paper used it and we want to test the analysis software that the paper used to ensure we get the same answer. Or because we want to see what our analysis technique would have shown with the knowledge that was available back then. Or simply to be able to track defects. The users of data will have to adapt to the idea of versions, like the users of software have. The maintainers of the dataset might release five different versions of it while you're writing your analysis code, so it can't be a painful process to incorporate the revised data into your project. With software we have shared libraries and dynamic libraries, supported by autotools and such packages. Our code has interfaces and a branch that promises backwards compatibility. What would that look like for data? And what is the data version of the dependency hell that software developers know all-too-well (M 1.5 depends on N 1.7 and P 2.0, but P 2.0 requires N 2.0, and upgrading N to 2.0 br

Using open source software was about "better and more effective government". He criticised government IT procurement for lacking "open standards" and making it difficult for small companies to get the contracts. "All too often a government IT system is incompatible with other types of software, which stifles competition and hampers innovation. "Looking at the litany of IT projects that have collapsed or spiralled over budget, it's clear too that this has meant billions of pounds wasted and public service reform being hampered," Mr Osborne said. "The government's approach needs to be overhauled."

National Income 1.0 Gross Domestic Product 1.1 State Domestic Product 1.2 Input- Output Table Agriculture * Land utilisation statistics * Area under principal crops * Production of principal crops * Average yield of principal crops * Availability of food grains * Net and gross area irrigated Transport * Railways- General statistics * Total road length by surface, Number of registered motor vehicles * Civil Aviation- Domestic services-International services * Shipping Industry * Production of selected items of major manufacturing industries * Index number of industrial production (Base:1993-94=100) * Annual survey of industries: Employment and value added -Statewise :Factory sector - 2003-04 & 2004-05 * Performance of Small Scale Industries Sector Energy * Primary source of energy (production) * Electricity: Generated and sold * Rural electrification in India Communication * Posts Telegraphs and Telephones Employment * Employment in public and private sector * Employment in Railways, Insurance * Factory employment * employment in banking,plantation Poverty & Employment Tourism * Number of foreign tourists to India by country of nationality * Prices * Index number of wholesale prices (By major groups and sub-groups) (Base: 1993-94=100) * Index number of consumer prices - Industrial workers (Base: 1982=100) * Index number of consumer prices - Agricultural labourers (Base: 1986-87=100) * Index number of consumer prices - Urban non-manual employees (Base: 1984-85=100) Social Statistics Balance of Payments * Overall balance of payments - Current account. * Overall balance of payments - Capital account. * Financing of payment deficits by plan periods * Foreign exchange reserves * External assistance - authorization and utilization classified by source Public Finance * Overall budgetary posit

In general, discussions at the conference covered four main points. The first is that official free access to law is not enough. Full free access requires a range of different providers and competitive republishing by third parties, which in turn requires an anti-monopoly policy on the part of the creator of legal information.... Second, countries must find a balance between the potential for commercial exploitation of information and the needs of the public. This is particularly relevant to open access to publicly funded research. The third point concerns effective access to, and re-usability of, legal information. Effective access requires that most governments promote the use of technologies that improve access to law, abandoning past approaches such as technical restrictions on the reuse of legal information. It is important that governments not only allow, but also help others to reproduce and re-use their legal materials, continually removing any impediments to re-publication. Finally, international cooperation is essential to providing free access to law. One week before the Florence event, the LII community participated in a meeting of experts organised by the Hague Conference on Private International Law's Permanent Bureau; a meeting entitled "Global Co-operation on the Provision of On-line Legal Information." Among other things, participants discussed how free, on-line resources can contribute to resolving trans-border disputes. At this meeting, a general consensus was reached on the need for countries to preserve their legal materials in order to make them available....

Examples of Indian government using social media tools.

"While governments throughout the world have different approaches to how they make their public sector information (PSI) available and the terms under which the information may be reused, there appears to be a broad recognition of the importance of digital networks and PSI to the economy and to society. However, despite the huge investments in PSI and the even larger estimated effects, surprisingly little is known about the costs and benefits of different information policies on the information society and the knowledge economy. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the current assessment methods and their underlying criteria, it should be possible to improve and apply such tools to help rationalize the policies and to clarify the role of the internet in disseminating PSI. This in turn can help promote the efficiency and effectiveness of PSI investments and management, and to improve their downstream economic and social results. The workshop that is summarized in this volume was intended to review the state of the art in assessment methods and to improve the understanding of what is known and what needs to be known about the effects of PSI activities."

Researchers at Princeton's Center for IT Policy have released a new paper urging federal agencies to focus on improving the availability of raw government data rather than building better user-facing web sites. They predict that if the data is made available in a structured format, private parties will develop innovative sites to view and manipulate it.

"At present the Department houses all the notifications dating back to year 1962. The total number of gazette notifications now in the record room run to around 61,71,000 approximately. Gazette Notifications prior to 1962 are available in National Archives. The revenue earnings of the Government through sale of gazette notifications are around Rs.5 crores per annum. The e-Gazette is expected to bring in some more dividends and ensure easy accessibility to the purchaser without their undergoing the rigours of reaching out to the sale counters (which are only a few in the entire country) of the Department of Publication, Ministry of Urban Development reducing the time lag in availability and quality printing. The website is accessible on www.egazette.nic.in."

"On 4th June 2010 the UK government released A whole load of useful data about much the governemt has been spending on various things we parse this data for you " This website provides it in easily parseable csv format.

"The country's existing information framework is scattered, with each state establishing its own data centre for automating land records, transport and municipal applications, among others. The PII plans to host all software applications on a cloud (internet), increasing efficiency and speed as well as slashing costs. "Government schemes costing about Rs 130,000 crore annually exist in silos. There is no single delivery point for citizens," said a presentation highlighting the PII's need. "The PII will consolidate about 100 schemes of India, spread across 75 departments and 35 states into a single information infrastructure." Mr Pitroda said duplicity in data will thus be removed. "Each department in the country wants to make its own software, even if it does exactly the same thing," he said. "

"In fact, more than combating corruption, the RTI campaign can serve as an effective tool to control the arbitrary use of power, and combat the failure of regulatory mechanisms in maintaining the rule of law. In all arenas - whether in economic policy or human rights - the need to make the matter public can act as a constraint on misgovernance. In this framework, the right to information is both a basic principle and a tool to enhance the political participation of ordinary citizens, where ethics and accountability work both ways - for the government to inform and people themselves to be more ethical in public life. By reinserting public ethics into our political discourse, it reinforces a position that no real alternative politics is possible without firmly establishing public ethics."

Information generated and collected by public sector entities represents a veritable minefield; it might make a much greater contribution to EU economies and societies, if current legal barriers to access and re-use were removed. The LAPSI (Legal Aspects of Public Sector Information) project intends to build a network apt to become the main European point of reference for high-level policy discussions and strategic action on all legal issues related to the access and the re-use of the PSI namely in the digital environment. The debate is to be organized around four focal points: (1) implementation and deployment issues; (2) design of the incentives for public bodies and private players, both in the for-profit and non-profit sectors, to make available and, respectively, to re-use public data; (3) special consideration of infra- and supra-national levels of access and re-use policies and practices, intended to enlist the dynamic forces of regulatory competition and to bring out the full potential of cross-border, EU-wide services; and crucially (4) strategic vision and occasions for out-of-the box thinking for the next steps ahead in policy making.

* Datum Conversion Package * Tool to generate Metadata as per NSDI standards in 'XML' format * Tool to load Metadata Records from XML file into PostGreSQl Database * NNRMS Viewer

The emphasis in MGNREGA is now on ensuring public accountability, strengthening transparency and encouraging activities that tap the productive potential of works undertaken so that it becomes a platform for sustainable development. In order to enforce transparency at the grass root level, the Ministry Of Rural Development intends to use ICT devices, especially Biometrics and integration with UIADAI to introduce biometric attendance on site and to improve the overall delivery system in the implementation of MGNREGA by capturing all the processes right from registration, demand of work, issue of dated receipt, allocation of work, attendance at worksite with GPS coordinates, measurement of work and wage payments.

"The Census Bureau has modified or suppressed some data on this site to protect confidentiality. Title 13 United States Code, Section 9, prohibits the Census Bureau from publishing results in which an individual's or business' data can be identified. The Census Bureau's internal Disclosure Review Board sets the confidentiality rules for all data releases. A checklist approach is used to ensure that all potential risks to the confidentiality of the data are considered and addressed. For more information on how the Census Bureau protects the confidentiality of data, please explore the following links."