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Data.gov.uk troupe gets shirty about standards

The data.gov.uk team has defended the release of datasets that are proving to be standards-unfriendly to developers. William Perrin and Chris Taggart penned a joint missive on the data.gov.uk site in which they rejected the idea of immediately creating an agreed set of data standards for publishing information online for coders …

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John Smith 19
WTF?

So WTF is Spikes Cavell?

Well....

They claim to have been running 18 years and sincs 2004 "Help public sector organisations transform their procurement"

Which sounds like they got first dibbs on some obscure (but *highly* informative) datasets from civil servants who *apparently* did not realise how valuable the information is to the right people.

BTW isn't allowing ad-hoc programs the ability to understand complex structured date the *whole* point of XML?

JimC

Its all very well

To say how wonderful providing all this data would be, but who's going to pay for people to write code to extract the data from all the various different systems, format it in whatever format and publish it, check it for accuracy and then maintain and change it month after month when the source systems change? How much extra do you want put on your Council tax to pay for it?

One of the problems with the late administration was their habit of announcing wonderful initiatives without a frigging clue of how it was going to be paid for. It would have been nice for central government to have gained a sense of reality, but obviously not...

Oh, and please don't bother to comment on the lines of "I could do it all in a week with a perl script/.net script".

spodula
FAIL
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The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits

Were talking data standards, not extraction. it shouldnt take too many people to choose a comon set of basic standards.

As for Extraction, writing something to do extraction should be a one-off thing, which shouldnt take a competent programmer long. In my experience, its never writing the data extraction that takes a long time, its cleaning up the rubbish that inevitably crufts a database.

Indeed, i tend to find it goes a lot quicker without the inevitable layer of middle management trying to justify their existances. Of course, As Local Government IT is the definintion of needless Bureaucracy, i suspect that wont be avoidable.

John Smith 19
Boffin
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@spodula

"As for Extraction, writing something to do extraction should be a one-off thing, which shouldnt take a competent programmer long. In my experience, its never writing the data extraction that takes a long time,"

Don't be too sure. Contractor friend of mine told of a project where Team leader sank *weeks* of time working up this super-duper ETL tool to do a *single* one time extraction to populate a new database. Know fixed O/P database known fixed database to be input to.

I've used import tools that should have a simple decision table internal design but had a rats nest of and/or logic instead to parse the file and route the records (yes I know awk or perl could probably have done the job but where do find perl on an i-series?)

spodula
WTF?

The good thing about standards.

... Is that there is so many of them, just get a list of the relevent ones, choose one and have done with it.

I understand that it takes 20 civil servants, 4 comittees, 3 draft papers and ministerial oversight for the Civil service to decide anything, but surely in this case, you could make do with just a bloke with some computer experience, (Real experience rather than those management types) and a few cups of tea, pretty much like the rest of industry does.

Of course, then those 20 civil servants would be out of a job....

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