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What do you consider to be the most exciting upcoming technology or system in the field of managing, aggregating, and visualizing diverse types of data?

First, make the data available in raw form

idea

What is the idea?

Worry about fancy displays, databases, formats and whatnot later.  There are plenty of people out there who will download the data and parse it on their own, producing interesting graphs and tables.

Why is it important?

Because if you try to put together a perfect or even really spiffy system before anyone gets a chance to peruse and calculate over the data, it's likely that nothing will ever happen.

Submitted by jpmassar (IT Engineering) on Apr 27, 2009

This idea is now closed to further comments.

Current number of stars: 3
based on 8 votes
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5 Comments

Member comment

Cool idea! Check out http://www.fpdsng.com/downloads/top_requests/TAS_Report.xls for the data in raw form. It’s distributed weekly! Very cool site!

Comment from ferluce at CBH Homes on Apr 27, 2009
Dialogue catalyst comment

Thanks for your feedback.  Do you have specific ideas or techniques that can be used to make the data available?

 

Comment from jwarren at Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board on Apr 27, 2009
Member comment

What does the data (i.e. metadata and data values) in their raw form mean?  What would the the analyzed results mean? 

You need to have definitions of the meaning and context of the data before it can be understood in its raw form and analyzed.

I suggest following a terminology process first, then release the fully-defined and governed raw data for free-form analysis.

 

Comment from RoyERoebuck at One World Information System on Apr 28, 2009
Member comment

I  agree with the comments. The data should be available in raw format.  I would go a step further and suggest it be made available as a public dataset. 

http://www.thenationaldialogue.org/ideas/amazon-public-datasets-credits-for-ec2

Comment from brianmackay on Apr 28, 2009
Dialogue catalyst comment

I like your idea of making the data available in raw form.  Given the wide array of citizens who visit Recovery.gov, do you believe that most will have the technical know-how to make the raw data useful?  Simply stated, should the much larger non-IT user population be satisfied first through pre-developed reports that have been created using the general public's feedback?

Comment from jwarren at Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board on Apr 29, 2009