New York, June 30, 2009 - The New York City Council is considering a legislative proposal, Intro. 991, that would improve public access to “raw data” held in city databases. Yesterday, in testimony before its Technology in Government Committee, headed by Council Member Gale Brewer, Connecting.nyc Inc. urged the use of the .nyc TLD in facilitating access and management of city databases.
In essence, we urged that the city think of a database as a thing, similar to a bench, a tree, a light post, or fire hydrant. And that a .nyc domain name be assigned to each database. The great thing about giving a domain name to each database (or other “thing”) is that you can then have a conversation about that database.
For example, think about the police department’s crimes database, and let’s take Mayor Bloomberg’s lead and call it “crimes.data.nyc.” By giving it an intuitive name - http:/ /www.crimes.data.nyc - you facilitate the work of programmers, but you also create a market place for that database. So at the crimes.data.nyc URL you would find:
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a detailed description of the data,
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a link to download the raw data,
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an ongoing conversation of how it “might” be used if only this or that was changed or added,
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comments and possibly a discussion by people who object to it containing too much information,
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a suggestion that a particular field should require privacy access,
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notations and links to the different apps where the data has been used, and
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a civic advocate / entrepreneur match program for locating people with similar interests and a desire to jointly develop apps based on the crimes.data.nyc data set.
Learn more about this and see our council testimony. (Commons Photo courtesy of equinoxefr.)