data.vic.gov.au launched
Victoria is the latest state to jump on the open data bandwagon following the Australian government and NSW. So how does it stack up?
The site is standard enough, with a search facility, categories, and tags to navigate through. There’s a blog and, oddly, an unstyled implementation of phpBB which detracts from the overall look and feel. Looks like an afterthought, but an ugly forum is better than no forum. Another minor issue is that, like the NSW site, the data set list is lacking is an RSS feed. 1-0 federal government.
The data sets themselves are of varying quality as seems to be the norm with the open data movement. Some are available as a direct download with mixed formats (csv, xls, kmz) – others are links out to external sites.
One thing that does bug me is the header “raw data”. There’s nothing raw about most of the data sets – they’re heavily aggregated denormalised and in some cases interpreted (talking about XLS files with graphs here).
If the government really wants to promote reuse, then all these data sets need to be provided as a web service and available as csv, json, and xml at the most granular level possible.
