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posted by janrinok on Thursday January 12 2017, @01:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the goodbye-to-vendor-lock-in? dept.

The New Jersey State Legislature is considering an act to make state government data freely available online. Enacting similar policies in government everywhere has long been a cherished goal of Open Data advocates. Having free and easy access to reliable data is a boon to software entrepreneurs and app creators.

The text of the Act begins:

1. This act shall be known and may be cited as the "New Jersey Open Data Initiative."

2. The Legislature finds and declares:

a. In recent years, the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents, or other mechanisms of control, has become prevalent;

b. This concept, which is generally referred to as open data, applies to data generated by government departments and agencies, some of which may already be public and available electronically;

c. It is in the interest of this State to increase public awareness and access to data and information created by and available from State departments and agencies, enhance government transparency and accountability, encourage public engagement, and stimulate innovation with the development of new analyses or applications based on the unique data provided by the State;

d. A significant benefit of open data is that it can spur economic development, as it enables private–sector companies to build upon such data to produce innovative and creative items and services that benefit society;

e. The intent of this act is to require the State to conduct a multi-year, multi-phased open data initiative program;

f. The intention is not to impede or delay the ongoing efforts of State government to move data online, nor to limit or expand a person's ability to access a public record; and

g. This act would protect the State from any liability for making open data available to the public, except in the case of gross negligence, willful and wanton misconduct, or intentional misconduct.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @02:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @02:22PM (#452941)

    Open Data ey... so the data will be available in open formats as well, instead of as Excel(*) Spreadsheets
    (*) Excel still has the dubious title of being the world's database. Mind-boggling, I know.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @09:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @09:45PM (#453079)

      Upon reading the headline, it also struck me that they should specify open non-proprietary formats as standards.
      (An AC below has mentioned XLS, XLSX, and DOCX specifically.)

      Outside of VisualBasic macros[1], FOSS apps have been dealing with XLS/XLSX files well for several years.
      If M$ stops moving the goalposts and quits changing the way their file formats work (which can make files incompatible with -their own- legacy stuff), even the proprietary format needn't be a sticking point.

      [1] ...and when OO.o forked, the LibreOffice folks embraced the work that had been done on M$ macros[2] (and had been rejected by the mainstream OO.o folks).
      Most of the most-commonly-used macro stuff has been covered for quite a while.

      [2] Mostly, this had been done in the OxygenOffice fork [archive.org] (associated with SuSE).
      From that 2009 version of the page:

      The current version is able to run VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) from Excel documents in Calc

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @06:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @06:50PM (#453012)

    Hey, it's New Joisey, who wants their stinkin' data?

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @08:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @08:04PM (#453038)

    Have some fun with xml. Find your own docx or xlsx file. Find your favorite program to unzip files. I personally like 7-zip. Change the extension in windows and unzip the file. If you are in linux you can just use the tool directly. The files are valid pkzip files with a xml file zipped up inside them.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @02:51AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @02:51AM (#453163)

      Right, getting the text out is easy.

      .docx files that engineers send to me often have figures or pictures in them. What format(s) are these in?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @07:58AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @07:58AM (#453734)

        base64 encoding?