>
> I echo Jeremy's point that it would be really interesting to
> know more about the human, political and organisational
> barriers James confronted in putting his project together,
> and how they were overcome (assuming they were!).
>
> All best,
>
> Nick
>
I had a head start organisationally, this beta is an extension of an
existing 'cross sector' history based project, and the new partners to this
beta are all in some way connected to the County Council, in the main
various departments (countryside access, tourism etc). Having said that, the
main barrier was partners having little or no available technical resource,
so I made the initial decision to keep the partners' API requirements as
simple as I could get them, namely GeoRSS.
I didn't specify any particular REST requirements, so some partners have
query strings, .asp, .php etc whilst others have hand created a static
rss.xml file and the beta keeps track of each of the 'harvesting' access
points (it creates a nightly cache rather than querying each partner
dynamically). I convinced everyone that even if the project was not
successful, they'd still have their GeoRSS feeds, and indeed some managers
of the services started experimenting with e.g Yahoo 'dashboard' and their
own data, with no technical help, which is good to see.
The beta forms part of a wider 'working together' encompassing marketing /
PR for the county rather than being standalone and in the next few weeks
should have biodiversity and species data on too, again expanding the
audience (a bit...)
I presented a longer term 'vision' that rather than just desktop or phone
that this work forms part of a 'county roadshow' where access points are
taken to the public and lock on to their physical locations to be part of
tourist info points - I mentioned the GoogleEarth screen at Eurostar and
Helsinki's City Wall and made everyone imagine their data used through such
interfaces.
There are still barriers to overcome (who's the project for? what's the
point? Some politics I wont mention) but a good start has been made 'freeing
the data'.
Cheers,
James
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