On Mon, 19 Jan 2009, Harry Metcalfe wrote:
Blogged on exactly that point the other day
http://www.thedextrousweb.com/2009/01/dcsf-statistical-releases-bbc-better-data-formats/
That is all technical (and there's nothing inherently
unparsable about a spreadsheet, even lots of big ones) -
context matters more. Throwing the data up on a website is
really not that hard.
Looking at it takes time and skilled manpower. Which is
exactly what the BBC are talking about. If you want to find
out how simple the data preparation is compared to the
checking, I'm sure Francis and Tom would love for people to
volunteer to help with the 2008 WTT zeitgeist. All that data
*is* in a structured format - the best it probably could be.
But anyone who has seen that process will know that it's
really not that simple.
You can read, even a large number of tables, into a database
very quickly. Could the data format be better, certainly;
but that's not necessarily the biggest problem.
It should not be more important to be first than to be right.
If nothing changed, you could use the same code as last
time. If things have changed, it makes no difference
whether your code reads a spreadsheet or from an API call.
You still should spend time checking before announcing that
somewhere is the best school area in Britain, or someone is
the worst MP.
Cheers
Sam
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 11:24 +0000, Tom Steinberg wrote:
It's a real shame that the media has used their skills to lobby for
the wrong thing.
24 hours is quite enough if the data is supplied in a nice format and
you just dump it into your pre-prepared database and run your
pre-prepared scripts.
The problem - the senior management don't know this is possible, so
they ask for the wrong, morally dubious thing (more time, exclusive
access to public information to raise private profits) rather than the
right thing, data in a format that can be parsed and published in
seconds.
best,
Tom
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