Data on the Web Best Practices

Yesterday, Open Data reached a new milestone with the publication of the W3C’s first public working draft of its Data on the Web Best Practices. Open Data is spreading across the globe and transforming the way data is collected, published, and used. But all of this is happening without well-documented standards, leading to data published with inconsistent metadata, lacking official documentation of approval processes, corroboration of sources, and with conflicting terms of use. Often Open Data is hard to compare to other sources, even across administrative departments located in the same building. Open Data from more than one source has to be aggregated, normalized, cleansed, checked for quality, verified for authenticity, and validated for terms of use, at huge expense before it can be analyzed.