California’s open data portal has progressed from an idea to an actual pilot. The state is now taking on what may be an even more ambitious project – the use of metadata to interpret its highly diverse data sets. This interesting information came to us from State Scoop in their article, “California to clean up messy open data with metadata.”
California uses different formats and schemas to label its data from agency to agency, and sometimes even from project to project. This explains the ongoing challenges that officials are facing. The developers of apps designed to track government data are also burdened with searching for data sets across agencies and services.
Since launch, the California Department of Technology reported the portal has grown to 325 data sets taken from across the state. The department says its goal is to publish a total of 425 data sets by next December.
The project, if successful, could lay a framework for civic tech advocates and officials to more readily build tools that can process data sets and significantly change lives.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
