What's an open standard?

[Elias Bizannes]

I tried earlier this year to define it and put it in the too hard basket. Now, the US CIO and CTO have a defininition that very succincly defined it:

"An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information. "

Great article on Open government: http://bit.ly/6i9del

Can we get an endorsement of the definition? I think it's an important one to support.

Elias Bizannes
http://eliasbizannes.com

[Gordon Rae]

Elias,

 

This is one of those topics where the Wikipedia entry is reasonably good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard

 

It covers the ITU and the IETF definitions, plus others from around the world.

Academics who study standards emphasise that the main problems are political, as are the main boundaries to participation.  The main points that are usually emphasized are

1. An Open Standard has multiple physical implementations, which are interoperable
2. You can adopt the standard without having to licence someone’s proprietary intellectual property

 

I personally like Bruce Perens' definition (in the Wikipedia entry) as it’s comprehensive, passionate in a good way, and doesn’t generate any false positives or false negatives, IMHO.

 

If you’re nervous about Wikipedia, checkout Sun’s page on the same topic, which also has solid citations:

http://www.sun.com/software/standards/definition.xml

 

Best

 

Gordon Rae

 

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[Kaliya *]

If you watch the CTO/CIO webcast - they mention my "question" which was more a comment.

they I think very carefully don't use the word "open standard" in the OGD

I am sure many kinds of data that agencies are going to release don't have "standard" ways to output them.

The challenge I see with agencies implementing open format data under OGD is that they will each invient their own way to create an "open format" to comply with teh regulation but will not actually innovate open standards across similar data sets.

So Atom is an open standard - my "unique" way of doing something similar in a machine readable format is not.

-Kaliya

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[Phil Wolff]

The first step is to get the data out in a way that is at least documented and machine readable, even if it's in excel or text files. Between the external ecosystem that wants to get and distribute and analyze data and the internal IT folks who want to strip all the effort out of disclosure, I'm pretty sure new standards will emerge and the "plaxos" of the world will bridge islands.