I found this on the New York Times Technology page. It is an interesting article about the government and the data that it has collected. The Unites States has been publishing this data for years electronically, and on paper. The CTO for the government is now putting more data on the web and even asking citizens to rate how useful the data was that found. This small blurb I found interesting. By rating the data, the government can create data about what is useful and what isn't. The opens it up for a couple of questions that I have: If most people don't find a particular data set useful will the government stop collecting it? Or will it stop offering the data at all?
Either way just because some piece of data may not seem relevant right now doesn't mean that it won't be relevant at some future time. I don't mind that the government is rating their data but what will it do with the metadata (data about the data)? Will that be for our consumption? What purpose would there be to major waterfowl flyways? Doesn't seem all that interesting, until you decide that you want to build an airport. With the airplane accident in New York last year, that seems to be incredibly interesting data to look at if your building a new airport.
Data is interesting but it might not be interesting to everyone. Rating is a really good idea because it lets you know what people find useful. My biggest fear though is stopping to collect certain data sets that my appear to be not useful. And the reason to stop collecting the data is to save money on the budget. This is congress constant push regarding the budget. Members question throwing money at science research projects like the life cycle of the fruit fly. So they stop funding the research, and just increase the use of pesticides on orange trees to kill them. Twenty years later the incidence of cancer goes up and no one know why. That is an extreme thought experiment but that is really the entire concept of collecting data sets in the first place. We may not know what it means now but I can bet that given enough time something relates to that data set. And it can probably help us in the future.
Removing data sets or stop collecting data on particular data sets can be harmful. We just don't know. So again I ask a simple question, what is the government going to do with data that is considered not useful?
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