Refresh

I was surprised to learn that there’s no way to access a user’s location history in Fire Eagle. And, in fact, Yahoo only stores the most recent user location. This a really, really, really limits how Fire Eagle can be used from both a user perspective and from a developer point-of-view.

As a user I’d much, much rather have Fire Eagle store my history centrally (and even forbid developers for storing this history themselves). This would allow me to control which applications can (at least in theory) access my trail, and which parts of the trail is available. To me, relegating this responsibility to 3rd-party developers negates much of the purpose of FE, because then there’s no one-stop place for storing and accessing locations data.

As a developer, I’ll probably need to work around this limitation by building a FE-specific data model for storing locations and by polling for user locations every five minutes or so. This seems highly inefficient, since I won’t be the only developer facing this problem.

Read more in the Fire Eagle discussion group…

I wrote about the huge potential in government as a service the other day, and apparently i’m not the only one who has seen the opportunity. The only difference is that while I just wrote a few thought and did nothing, others have actually done exciting work on this front. Some articles in English:

• Public Danish Data REST Interface
• OIO REST: RESTful web services developed by the Danish Public Sector

And more in Danish

• Free Willy
• OIO REST
• Danmark Web Service
• Denmark in REST
• Write-up of the OIO REST workshop

ReadWriteWeb just posted an intriguing article about the next generation of e-government. The post basically lists the arguments from an upcoming scholarly article about the subject. The main argument is simple: Government shouldn’t spend it’s time building web sites, instead it should “focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data”. Rather than building and maintaining a website of upcoming bills at ft.dk the Danish parliament should make the data available and have others mash it up in usable ways.

Now, I’m not a deregulating liberalist, and I’m absolutely certain that a strategy of only making data available to private entrepreneurs simply wouldn’t work in a Danish contexts. But I’m also convinced that a mandated policy of making data easily available to developers has explosive potential.

Let me list a few examples. The best Danish mapping service, Findvej.dk is a mashup of both publicly and privately owned data. It was built by one guy in with a good idea and access to the necessary data. The data was probably hard to find, and the service would be much better with even more accessible data. But you get my point.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of possible counter-examples and I’ll just pick one. The weather. Denmark has a tax-funded, public weather service, which generates plenty of data every day, and this data is available to everyone through a web browser. Now, given all the data from the weather service, would I be able to build a better website serving all the same user groups as DMI? Probably not. But given access to that data I would be able to build a service which suits my needs much, much better that DMI.dk. And most likely, my service would serve others as well.

Why isn’t there an Danish version of EveryBlock? The reason isn’t lack of interest. The reason isn’t lack of data, because statistics and incident reports are being kept by the police. The reason is that the data isn’t accessible as an open building block (that metaphor didn’t work).

This presents a major challenge to government, and even if I’ve used Danish examples, those challenges are probably both very global and very local. The past few years have shown convincingly that web developers are hungry for interesting data to reinvent by merging across data sources, and this potential could be easily harvested by some sly government initiatives.