The challenge
As noted in Open Data Stories’ first story, there are calls from various quarters for more data on the utility of governments releasing data and other material for re-use.
The challenge would seem to be this: if people and organisations want governments to continue to invest in open data initiatives, they should jump into the feedback loop and tell governments, and the world, when they are putting open government data to good use. The scale or nature of beneficial use shouldn’t matter. It might be economic, creative, cultural or environmental. Or it could be something else. But tell us your story. Equally, interested stakeholders such as Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation can tell us their stories too, even if that is only drawing us to relevant (and openly licensed ) articles that we can repost on Open Data Stories. And, of course, agencies who see the data they steward being put to good use should tell us too.
Whatever the case, share your stories with others. The more you do, the richer the feedback loop and that, in turn, is likely to enable open data policies to be better developed and refined and, ultimately, to be sustainable.
Tom Johnson on 29 Aug 11Zanran helps you to find 'semi-structured' data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts. Put more simply: Zanran is Google for data. Language. English only please... for now. Phrase search. You can use double quotes to make phrases (e.g. "mobile phones"). Booleans. You can use a plus '+' to make a word mandatory, or a minus '-' to exclude it (e.g. +gas -oil production) Vocabulary. We have only limited synonyms - please try different words in your query. And we don't spell-check ... yet.