Beyond Open Data, there are also troves of data that cannot be made public because they contain personal information.
However it would be useful to have access to this data in certain ways:
- for the person concerned, for his/her personal files
- anonymously / aggregated by location or through other groups for statistical analysis and other studies
There is an effort ongoing in the US and there starts to be quite a lot of papers on the subject. One of the most complete is “What is smart disclosure?” on O’Reilly. The US governments is producing standards to allow access to this data.
This lead the creation of a number of colored buttons depending on the type of data and the type of access.
These standards will certainly spread rapidly across the world as liberating those troves of data becomes an increasing national priority: the wealth of knowledge that will be derived from this data will be huge and I can’t wait to see what incredible advances we’ll see from the analysis of all this data.
Expect those colored buttons to invade your life soon!
