Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by catacombs on Sunday December 23, 2018 @11:04AM (#18746783)

This is the worst. Thankfully, there are tools like Tabula to extract the data.

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[dead]

Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by clessg on Sunday December 23, 2018 @10:25AM (#18746558)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by mikestew on Sunday December 23, 2018 @10:29AM (#18746588)

Not only are you being rude by implying the article went unread, you’re also showing an astounding lack of imagination (perhaps stifled by a need to point out the errors of others). Parent is saying that despite whatever parts of the law you care to snarkily quote, government employees will find a way to screw it up.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by danso on Sunday December 23, 2018 @10:28AM (#18746577)

This policy exists in many states. But plenty of local reporters have tales about how officials respond with PDFs because they either don't realize that the PDFs are generated from a (legacy) system that could output XLS/CSV, or because they fear that Excel sheets/text files are alterable. The benefit of having the law, though, makes it easier to convince officials to tell their IT people to get it right, under threat of lawsuit.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by Rexxar on Sunday December 23, 2018 @10:30AM (#18746592)

Scanned pdf of a spreadsheet is clearly machine-readable, as you can read this document with your computer.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by canibal57 on Sunday December 23, 2018 @04:56PM (#18748595)

I'm pretty sure that isn't what machine-readable means, especially in this context. But this kind of obtuse reading seems like it would be exactly how the concern of the parent comment would come into being.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by ekianjo on Sunday December 23, 2018 @10:10PM (#18750019)

If you have this kind of standard then literally everything is machine-readable, even handwriting with proper machine learning models. That's quite clearly not the spirit of the wording.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by wilde on Sunday December 23, 2018 @10:51AM (#18746694)

I’ll defend this practice. It’s the only way of knowing for sure that you’re transmitting exactly the information you intend to send. Even copy/paste often picks up other stuff you don’t intend.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by TheCoelacanth on Sunday December 23, 2018 @02:14PM (#18747772)

It's more of a way to prevent transmitting any easily accessible data at all. Using a human-auditable but still machine-readable format like CSV is what should be done.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by prepend on Sunday December 23, 2018 @11:09AM (#18746819)

It the only, but maybe the easiest.

Having a data review process with automated integrity, confidentiality, and quality checks is not terribly difficult.

But having a prototocol to export the pdf to csv is also dead easy for confirming only the data relevant is included. ASCII is just as “easy” as scan, but it requires training clerks to be data-oriented rather than document.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by paulryanrogers on Sunday December 23, 2018 @02:11PM (#18747753)

_ugh_ if only CSVs were standardized sooner and more completely. There are many encoding, delimiter, escaping and truncation conventions to deal with in real world data.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by prepend on Sunday December 23, 2018 @06:38PM (#18749179)

Definitely. They are better than PDFs, but still have lots of room for improvement.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by akudha on Sunday December 23, 2018 @07:45PM (#18749467)

There are other ways to ensure this. Even with your own logic, it would make sense then to send both the Excel sheets and scanned PDFs of the Excel sheets, isn't it? It would be super comical though

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by lostlogin on Sunday December 23, 2018 @01:44PM (#18747606)

PDFs can and do send non visible data that wasn’t intended to be transmitted.

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Re:Congress votes to make open government data the default i... by jellicle on Sunday December 23, 2018 @01:38PM (#18747573)

But as the public is typically entitled to that "other stuff" information as well, you're just obstructing.

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