Awareness of Open Data within governments has gained considerable traction in the last few years. Arguably, Open Data has been successful partly because it is fairly easy to understand. It focuses on making freely available to the public an asset, data, that has already paid for through taxes. This government data can then be reused by programmers, web developers and others to build new services and applications. It also has the support of an active and engaged community of advocates inside and outside of government.
A related concept, Open Government, has been gaining attention recently. The idea is more abstract than Open Data, and also at an earlier stage of development. I was happy to read about these three pillars of Open Government proposed by an Australian Senator, Kate Lundy.
Tuesday 22 March 2011
Wednesday 9 March 2011
The father of taxonomies, part 1
Classifications and taxonomies help you anticipate where to find a particular kind of information. Imagine yourself browsing a website or looking for a particular kind of record- you should know where to look based on the name of the category or record series.
For instance, if you are browsing the City of Toronto’s website for information about city council, you would probably expect to find it in the accessing City Hall tab. However, new information is constantly being produced, potentially forcing changes in a classification. Today, it is widely recognized that classification systems need to strike a balance between organizing information as it exists at present, and being flexible enough to incorporate new information.
Carl Linnaeus is often considered the father of taxonomies, for his work developing biological classification systems. New research suggests that Linnaeus pioneered the index card, a seemingly simple tool that was in fact revolutionary advance for organizing information:
“Linnaeus had to manage a conflict between the need to bring information into a fixed order for purposes of later retrieval, and the need to permanently integrate new information into that order, says Mueller-Wille. “His solution to this dilemma was to keep information on particular subjects on separate sheets, which could be complemented and reshuffled.”
For instance, if you are browsing the City of Toronto’s website for information about city council, you would probably expect to find it in the accessing City Hall tab. However, new information is constantly being produced, potentially forcing changes in a classification. Today, it is widely recognized that classification systems need to strike a balance between organizing information as it exists at present, and being flexible enough to incorporate new information.
Carl Linnaeus is often considered the father of taxonomies, for his work developing biological classification systems. New research suggests that Linnaeus pioneered the index card, a seemingly simple tool that was in fact revolutionary advance for organizing information:
“Linnaeus had to manage a conflict between the need to bring information into a fixed order for purposes of later retrieval, and the need to permanently integrate new information into that order, says Mueller-Wille. “His solution to this dilemma was to keep information on particular subjects on separate sheets, which could be complemented and reshuffled.”
Read how Carl Linnaeus invented the index card on Science Daily.
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