Image of Stephen Wolfram via Wikipedia

British-born computer scientist Stephen Wolfram sees ongoing efforts to extend the Internet’s top-level domains (TLDs) beyond the familiar .com, .org, .uk etc as an opportunity to raise the profile of machine-readable data. In a blog post published yesterday, he argues that a new .data domain would increase “exposure of data on the internet—and [provide] added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.” Whilst wholly in favour of Wolfram’s stated aim, I can’t help feeling that his suggested solution is at best unnecessary and at worst a worrying segregration of data from the ‘proper’ web that everyone else will continue to exploit.

Back in June of last year, the body responsible for coordinating the global domain name system approved a plan to permit new top-level domains (the letters after the final dot in an internet address — the .com in cloudofdata.com, the .uk in bbc.co.uk, the .edu in harvard.edu). Until recently, these top-level domains have been tightly controlled, with a small set of generic domains (.edu, .gov, .mil, .org, etc), a larger set of country domains (.uk, .fi, .nz, etc) and one or two others such as .eu. From tomorrow, anyone with $185,000 will be able to submit a proposal to create and manage a new top level domain, and it’s possible that there could eventually be thousands of them. Wolfram is keen to ensure that data doesn’t miss out on the ‘opportunity.’

As Wolfram himself recognises, there is already an awful lot of machine-readable data on the web. Some of it sits embedded within the web pages that humans read, with specially formatted code waiting to be triggered by the calendars, the address books, or the browser plugins of site visitors. Some of it is packaged up in data files, offered for download. And some of it waits inside a database, ready to be delivered in response to an API call or a query typed into a web form.

There is a growing enthusiasm for exposing this data for reuse. Government transparency agendas have driven public sector data sites like data.gov.uk and data.gov. Similarly, efforts such as data.open.ac.uk and data.southampton.ac.uk see universities beginning to consciously collect data sets together and offer them up for reuse. Similar efforts in the commercial world are less easy to point to, but that reticence has nothing whatsoever to do with the lack of a ford.data, boeing.data, ge.data or astrazeneca.data domain!

In some ways, the convention for gathering significant chunks of data on a data.xxx.yyy site echoes Wolfram’s intention, but with a number of advantages. Data without context is far less valuable than data with context. Much of that context may be inferred from the domain in which the data lives, with data delivered from a .gov or .edu (or .gov.uk or .ac.uk) site perhaps interpreted differently to data hosted on .com, .biz, or .xxx. Southampton University, the Open University, and the US Federal Government are able to gather data up and make it available for download via their existing data. sites if they choose. This offers human visitors to their sites a degree of convenience, whilst retaining the power and brand attributes of their existing domain. Gov.data, gov.uk.data, open.ac.uk.data, southampton.ac.uk.data, though? All are messy, in ways that Wolfram’s own wolfram.data would admittedly not be, and all are simply additional registrations that the institutions would have to pay for in order to stop someone else grabbing the domain.

At the end of the day, the machines don’t actually care. The existing data.open.ac.uk-type sites are human conveniences, not machine enablers. The computers, and the software they run, are quite capable of crawling the public web and finding accessible data wherever it lies on a site. There are plenty of reasons to continue embedding little snippets of data inside human readable web pages, regardless of whether you have a data.wolfram.com or a wolfram.data site. Content negotiation is becoming increasingly capable, such that there really is no need for what Wolfram calls a ‘parallel construct to the ordinary web’ at all. A human being arriving at a web site sees human readable content, whilst various software tools would automatically be presented with very different data or functions, optimised to their capabilities and requirements.

By all means, let us show the curious some of the existing techniques that work in making data more easily accessible. By all means, let us identify the gaps, the issues, the problems (none of which a new TLD even begins to address). Yes, let us definitely and unambiguously set about “highlighting the exposure of data on the internet—and providing added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.”

But please, let us not be distracted by the false hope that adding yet another TLD to the babel that ICANN is about to unleash can do anything more than consign data to some online ghetto, wallowing unwanted, unloved and unused as companies and their customers lavish love, attention, and clicks upon the .com domain over on the ‘proper’ web.

Thanks to Raphaël Troncy, whose tweet first drew the story to my attention.

Related articles

• Is It Time For Computers To Have Their Own .Data Domains? (techcrunch.com)
• ICANN Pushes Ahead With January 12 Launch For New Top-Level Domains (wired.com)
• The biggest change in DNS since Dot-Com (wired.com)

The border between the USA and Canada, in Washington State

In my last post I looked at the USA PATRIOT Act, and at some of the ways in which it exemplifies differences in attitude and approach on either side of the Atlantic. In our increasingly connected world, these differences begin to pose quite serious challenges for those wishing to join up, to aggregate, and to operate at scale. In this post I’ll take a look at one particular case in which matters must soon come to a head; the current enthusiasm for cross-border data flows, and what GigaOM’s Derrick Harris refers to as “free trade for data.”

At first glance, the concept of free trade for data makes a lot of sense. Of course data should be able to move with reasonable freedom from country to country. As someone who once had the job title of ‘Interoperability Focus’ I’m bound to agree that international standards should normally be used to promote interoperability and transparency. Few, surely, would not welcome cross-border arrangements to encourage entrepreneurial reuse of data, or to ensure that people in different countries can access popular online services headquartered overseas?

Unfortunately, the bulk of the evangelism around reaching new agreements here is nationalistic, partisan, and closely tied to particular world views. From here in Europe, American posturing on the topic grates. From America, we Europeans no doubt appear protectionist and over-cautious. And elsewhere in the world, governments and companies with valid contributions to make cry out to be heard amidst the trans-Atlantic babel.

Derrick’s post from last November is a case in point, discussing submissions by US companies (Visa, Mastercard, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, etc) to a US body (the National Foreign Trade Council), in an attempt to influence US government policy with respect to its peers around the world. The topic was Cross-Border data sharing, but similar companies from overseas were not involved. Nokia? Vodafone? Baidu? SAP? HSBC? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Companies embracing a particular world view, rooted in a particular culture, come together to draw up recommendations that (probably in good faith) reflect that world view and those cultural norms. Whether implicitly or explicitly, those recommendations then seek to project that world view onto other countries, other cultures. We all do it. We all bring our baggage, our beliefs, our presumptions. Sometimes we know when we’re doing it, and we can either carry on regardless, or we can attempt to account for alternative approaches. But all too often the cultural norms are so ingrained that we forget they’re there. We assume that they’re normal. We assume that they’re shared. And then we’re surprised when Australians balk at receiving the ‘summer’ release of software in June, when Americans don’t consider that piece of personal data to be sensitive, or when Europeans think Government really should be involved in regulating a social networking site.

If we want to ensure the unimpeded flow of data across borders — and we should — then we need to begin by recognising that the places and people on either side of that border are very likely to be different. Their attitudes are different. Their needs are different. Their aspirations are different. Their laws are different. In the early days of the Internet and the web, legislation, policy and even expectation did not really exist. Almost by default, US attitudes and presumptions tended to apply unless a particular country cared enough to institute something different inside their own borders. As we become more and more interested in territoriality and jurisdiction with respect to data, that naive innocence no longer applies. There is no longer a blank canvas upon which the innovators can paint their hopes. We have policies, regulations, and laws. We have populations that have experienced today’s web, and we have a media quick to interject its perspective.

Today, far more than at the web’s birth, we have to engage in public dialogue about what we want to achieve, and why. We cannot achieve Derrick’s aspiration of free trade for data and leave every local law, policy and procedure untouched. But nor can we achieve it by projecting a single world view around the globe, sweeping all of those prior laws aside.

Rather than entrench behind a US ‘position,’ a European ‘position’ (including 24 variant positions, two abstensions and an opt-out), a Chinese ‘position,’ and so on, can’t we begin to understand what some of the real opportunities — and concerns — might be?

Big companies that operate internationally (like those developing the document (PDF) Derrick discussed) absolutely need to come together, to share their perspectives on the pain of moving data around. But for those companies only to be American is insane, and counter-productive. Nokia has perspectives to share here, as do HSBC or Vodafone. Let’s hear them in the same forum. Let’s also hear individual governments, speaking up for the concerns and desires of their citizens. Let’s hear the citizens themselves, when they care enough to express an opinion. But let’s hear all of it early, before it becomes entrenched in a set of contradictory official statements.

Then we might arrive at a sensible approach to ensuring free trade for data, rather than the projection of an American ideal upon the rest of us.

And that sounds like a good topic for one of those panels at Davos later this month…

Related articles

• Advancing the free flow of information (googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com)
• PATRIOT Act clouds picture for tech – POLITICO.com Print View (mbcalyn.com)
• Border accord (economist.com)
• ANALYSIS: What the new border deal means for you (cbc.ca)

As we discuss in this podcast, the programme is ambitious but eminently achievable, and builds upon a tradition that has actually been a lot more open than it may sometimes appear.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

John describes work at OPSI and elsewhere in the UK Government, and also draws upon his role as co-Chair of the World Wide Web Consortium’s e-Government Interest Group to consider some of the broader issues.

He concludes by issuing an invitation to anyone interested in working with Government to ensure that data is made available to a timetable and in forms that really meet the needs of potential beneficiaries here and overseas.

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• Councils urged to free e-data (guardian.co.uk)
• Open government data and Digital Britain (opencontentlawyer.com)
• The Socioeconomic Effects of Public Sector Information (zzzoot.blogspot.com)
• Talking with Mark Birbeck about RDFa and its use in Government (cloudofdata.com)