On 14 January 2011 22:55, Mark Goodge <[email protected]> wrote: > > I seem to have found myself in the position of defending - or, at least, of > being perceived to defend - restrictive approaches to government data.
I think that's because you have lost track of what it is we were discussing and ended up confusing yourself. Its easily done and something I do all the time. Consider the proposition that the land registry or companies house registration should be made public (in the sense I have already explained) and free. There might be an objection that this would allow the discovery of facts about individuals that ought not to be made public. The counter to this is that _some_ facts about individuals are appropriate to make public. The solution is to adopt an approach that avoids those facts being part of the publicly available data. Your confusion is in thinking that: (1) the decision that it is OK for particular data to be made public, means that our policy will always allow that data to be discovered (2) (implied in what you said) the proposition "removing private data from a dataset will make it less useful" somehow implies that the data sould not be removed and the dataset kept private. So, the fact that names aren't unique identifiers for directors isn't relevant to whether the Companies House data ought to be released. The most you can do with the Director(name, company) relation, is to infer that a particular individual is the director of that company. Once we have decided that that data is legitimately public, it doesn't matter that you won't always be able to make that inference. Sure, it would be nice to have better data that did the job, but that's another more difficult question. I am sorry if I am not being clear. If I was allowed to use Heyting Algebras this would all be clear, but I fear that they are disallowed. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
