Guest bloggers taking a holiday for July
Hi all. We're taking a little guest blogger holiday for the month of July. FGI volunteers will continue to post to the center column. We have a *really* special guest lined up for August, so stay tuned for that! HUGE thanks to the Stanford Law Librarians, who graciously took 2 rounds of BOTM! And as always, if you're interested in being a guest blogger, please email us at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info. You may also have noticed that we've got a new look. We just thought it was time for a little spruced-up look and feel, sort of like a new shirt :-) We're still the same old FGI underneath. Let us know what you think by leaving us a comment. Continue reading
Making America’s operating system open source
As a documents librarian, it's always been a particular frustration to me that I could give access to the CA Codes to all who asked *except* for Title 24, the CA Building Standards Codes which are under copyright by and must be purchased from various organizations -- for @ $890! Well, no more. Carl Malamud and his public domain avengers have just liberated Title 24 (download the whole kit and caboodle here!). This is truly a great birthday present on Independence Day!!
PDF is now ISO standard
PDF (Portable Document Format) has been approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The new standard is ISO 32000-1.
ISO 32000-1:2008 specifies a digital form for representing electronic documents to enable users to exchange and view electronic documents independent of the environment in which they were created or the environment in which they are viewed or printed. It is intended for the developer of software that creates PDF files (conforming writers), software that reads existing PDF files and interprets their contents for display and interaction (conforming readers) and PDF products that read and/or write PDF files for a variety of other purposes (conforming products).See also: PDF now ISO standard, By Joab Jackson, GCN, 07/03/08.
With Adobe relinquishing control of PDF, the ISO Document Management Applications Technical Committee will review any changes made to the format. The openly published standard provides the technical information required for writing software programs that can create and read PDF files, ensuring that organizations will always have some tools available to render PDFs, even if Adobe stops shipping its PDF viewer.PDF/A (Electronic document file format for long-term preservation) was approved by ISO earlier. Continue reading
District of Columbia provides live data feeds
I had not seen this before, but it looks like a model for open government. The District of Columbia provides free access to "city operational data" (e.g., Demographics, Health Care, Environment, Human Services, Education, Economic Development, Public Safety) in a variety of formats including RSS (Atom) feeds, XML, CSV, and ESRI Shapefiles. The feeds are drawn from more than 150 data sets, ranging from the all- important crime reports to pothole complaints. DC Data Catalog and Data Feeds Continue reading
Declaration of Independence
On this July Fourth, I was pleased to find that the Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute blog, LII Announce, quoted this paragraph from the Declaration of Independence, number 4 of the many grievances listed by the colonists against the King:
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.And of this passage, they say:
That the colonists should consider a complaint about informational distance to be on a par with the dissolution of the legislatures, imposition of unfair taxes, and the lack of a judiciary is revealing. These days, the de facto depository of our public records is the Internet, no longer physically distant but perhaps equally fatiguing in other ways. Outmoded publishing policies and practices -- and a failure to recognize the public need for legal information -- keep us at a remove from our public legal information that is greater than it should be. We're a click away in theory, but the practical distance is much greater.Thanks to Tom for the tip on the OpenHouseProject mailing list. Continue reading
-- The Glorious Fourth, by Charles Macklin, LII Announce, July 4, 2008.