2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Wholesale and Retail Information Markets
Progress in Data and Technology 119
For information to be accessible for community improvement, both the
wholesale and retail information markets must be healthy. Wholesale
datasets—large-scale numeric or unstructured text files—are seldom
useful without further processing. Retail information—maps, charts,
animations, easily consumable tables, and other user-friendly outputs—
are much more valuable to the end consumer. Conversion of any raw
material into finished products is typically handled by value-adding artisans
and manufacturers. Data resources work in the same way: when raw
data are available and demand for finished products is strong, developers
will emerge to create the finished products. When raw data are unavailable
or the demand for value-added products falls under the threshold
of profitability, the raw-to-ready conversion never gains critical mass.
Until recently, data tools that were relevant to community revitalization
efforts were doubly doomed. Not only were financial resources (i.e.,
demand for finished data products) lacking, but the raw data needed to
manufacture them were scarce. Recently the picture has brightened for
both markets.
Progress in Wholesale Information Markets
Government as fortress was the norm in the United States for two centuries
before the digital age began to tear down small chunks of the
fortress walls. Soon after the Internet became a prominent feature of
everyday life in the 1990s, public agencies at all levels began posting
information in static Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Portable
Document Format (PDF) documents. These documents needed
to be downloaded one at a time and converted into dynamic database
formats that could be queried. Screen scraping (computer programming
that automated the download of HTML text) was commonplace but suffered
fatal breakdowns every time the HTML documents were structurally
revised. Within a few years, downloadable spreadsheets and dBase
files became available from the US Environmental Protection Agency,
many state police agencies, and other agencies. But the first real breach
in Fort Government occurred with the advent of protocols for retrieving
machine-readable data. (Machine readable means a computer can comprehend
and manipulate data without human intervention and can produce
whatever the user has requested, such as maps, charts, or reports.)