Talk:OpenDataPrinciples/primary

From OpenGovData

[from carl: this page was blank so I added words ... but, I think I wrote too much and this may duplicate material already in other principles. Feel free to slash away.]

Primary data is an important aspect of compliance with the Open Government Data principles. All too often, audio, video, and images are only made available at low resolution to Internet user, making the data impossible to use in any professional application. The choice of an appropriate "low" resolution format yesterday begins to look unusable by the standards of today.

If an entity chooses to transform data by aggregation or transcoding for use on an Internet site built for end users, it still has an obligation to make the full-resolution information available in bulk for others to build their own sites with and to preserve the data for posterity.

Just as one should not destroy information by presenting and preserving only low-resolution imagery, numeric or tabular data should not be aggressively aggregated for use in one particular Internet application at the cost of throwing public information that could be used.

The determination of what is an acceptable level of granularity to present and preserve is a moving target and should be based on best practices of the time, with a heavy bias towards "more is better."