Agency data isn't perfect and transparency isn't enough

Raw data isn't always the same as government transparency, said speakers and audience members during a May 25 session at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C.

Said one audience member, "there are lies, damned lies, statistics and government data." John Sheridan, head of e-Services and Strategy at the United Kingdom's Office of Public Sector Information and co-chair of the W3C's eGovernment Interest Group, said it's important that agencies consider whether or not they are publishing data responsibly. "If I put a CSV file with some statistics on the web, that's great. But often there's a piece of context--maybe we changed the way we calculated the figure between two sets between 2002 and 2003. Maybe there's a particular piece of prominence associated with the data in terms of how it was collected or which agency collected it," said Sheridan. That information should be incorporated into the data in some way.