For me this is not technical, the machine will rumble on and grind
down the data converting coffee into code etc... as it has. It's
very, very political - as you proved with the presidential influence.
Brokering grown up information access policies to deal with the
amount of sharing that he is talking about is not trivial, 9/11
rolled back the clock a few decades and now the current climate of
web 2.0 'touchy feeley' Internet does nothing for this, where we all
roll around in an ecstasy of sharing (very personal info with
marketeers).
If the data is that critical to the national interest, what would be
the penalty for someone intentionally corrupting your data if it had
been made available, or for you if you had left a hole that meant it
could be corrupted? Who would audit your data if it were to be made
public (for inaccuracies), would it be audited? Who would ultimately
be responsible for bad/corrupted shared data, that say, cost lives?
Those are the hard questions.
Kind regards
Paul Harwood
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On 13 Mar 2009, at 15:36, Eric Wolf wrote:
"You do your little bit. Everybody does their little bit. That's what
linked data is all about" - or is that what the Borg is all about?
Nice shoutout to OSM in the talk.
Here's a problem - where some of the walls come in:
The USGS data holdings are vital to the security of the US. I don't
mean that preventing access creates security. I mean that if the
databases are corrupted, the ability of the government to respond to
threats (human or natural) is diminished. So we can't just open the
doors to the databases. Berners-Lee didn't predict the security
concerns created by his World Wide Web and he grossly underestimates
security in opening access to raw data. In his example of OSM, there
was nothing to stop him from putting in the wrong information or even
deleting the feature.
Further, the shoestring budgets the USGS has been on for the past
eight years has ensured that the USGS only has minimal capacity. The
databases are multiple petabytes in size. We have backups of
individual databases - but we can't create an entire separate copy of
the database.
Finally, the USGS is extremely sensitive to criticism. The past eight
years have made it even hard to publish established science. People
were getting fired for published good science just because it
countered the President's policies. The people who are left at the
USGS were able to work in that environment.
The benefits of linked data are obvious. But how do we actually get
there from here? The USGS should link data internally. Then we can
look at security concerns to open the linkages.
-Eric
-=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=-
Eric B. Wolf 720-209-6818
USGS Geographer
Center of Excellence in GIScience
PhD Student
CU-Boulder - Geography
On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Paul Harwood <[email protected]> wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/bxua4r
Appropriate to the recent data disclosure discussions...
Kind regards
Paul Harwood
.tel: http://telreg.vip.tel
+44(0)78 25 25 43 25
[email protected]
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