Phil Windley's 12-point manifesto for public information officers

Phil Windley, Utah's CIO, has written a terrific list of guiding principles for those who publish data for public consumption. The list begins:

1. All queries for data from a web server should produce at least XML. If human readability is required, post process the XML with XSLT. As an example, if I go to the professional licensing division and query about doctors, the application should, at a minimum, produce XML.
2. Data queries should be accessible as a URI and a URI should be associated with each resource (a resource includes even a single data element). For example, I should be able to query for a professional license using a URI like: http://www.dopl.utah.gov/llv?last_name=windley (this is not a valid URI.) If this query returns a list of results, each of those results should be available individually as XML using a URI reference.

[ Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog ]

His 12-point manifesto should be nailed to the door of every government information office. He asks: "What am I missing?" Nothing, Phil! If just your first two principles were broadly applied, the world would be a much better place.

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/07/08.html#a330