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In order for timely and accurate data to be available, State agencies and municipalities must make significant changes to their information infrastructure. All too often, public data sets released to the public contain inconsistent geographic divisions and categories. Well meaning officials seeking to protect confidentiality are too often overly conservative and release no data whatsoever. Information systems and department policies are structured solely to administer programs, with little regard to serving up data for evaluation or to inform public discourse. Uncoordinated technology purchases result in incompatible systems that do not communicate with each other, and inconsistent funding make creating a coherent information system challenging. Although some towns and departments are technology leaders making strategic, forward-looking investments in Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, many are behind and even further threatened by budget cuts.

New technology, standards, and protocols make a new type of IT infrastructure possible. The Commonwealth can start implementing a federated data center approach to the state one agency and municipality at a time. A service oriented architecture making web services available over the Internet can make new forms of data collection and analysis possible and realize investment efficiencies. Finally, ensuring that all the data that is harvested from these efforts remains public information is critical. Municipalities and state agencies will need continued leadership, technical assistance and incentives from the state’s Information Technology Division to shift to this new paradigm. The resulting information infrastructure will be characterized by a nimble information systems that exchanges data quickly and efficiency through web services for use in a wide range of purposes.

10)    Create the information infrastructure necessary to make data accessible in a timely manner
The traditional approach to manage data has been the “data center” model. In this approach, users access a central workstation or server that contains multiple data sets. Several problems limit the usefulness of this approach. The centralized data center model is easily overwhelmed as the spatial complexity and number of relevant data sets greatly increases; copies of records on the data center server cannot be easily updated as changes occur, subjecting it to misinterpretation; individual data sets are ill-matched with one another, making comparison and integration difficult. A new approach can address these concerns and take advantage of the usability and interactivity of new technology.

A federated data center model seamlessly connects multiple data sources to stakeholders and decision makers over the Internet. Official data sources publish information using common data structures, formats and tools that allow cross-referencing of key datasets. Intelligent data intermediaries will analyze the raw data, and make it available to a variety of users. While the new system both depends on and encourages collaboration, it will not require data providers to alter their current collection methods.  In this approach, data intermediaries will focus on creating and managing a shared framework for data interoperability, maintaining relationships with a cluster of data providers, and providing streamlined data services. The State’s MassGIS as well as the Federal government’s Data Ferret have set up the infrastructure to provide data in this manner. Currently no data intermediary is positioned in the region or in the state to take to take advantage of the investments and resulting efficiencies.

10.a    MAPC should develop an open source and interoperable data sharing platform

10.b    MAPC will work with Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute Technology (MIT) to implement middleware

10.c    MAPC, MassGIS, state agencies, and academic partners should create a working group to establish standards that allow analysis across multiple data sources

10.d    State agencies should adopt service oriented architecture (SOA) for all departments and information technology investments

10.e    MAPC, municipalities, and public agencies should adopt open standards when they can provide superior total cost of ownership and interoperability to proprietary systems and formats

10.f    The Legislature in collaboration with the State’s Information Technology Division (ITD) should create incentives to encourage adoption of open standards and software

11)    Use licensing to allow public use of government-created data while protecting agency interests.
Government agencies should take steps to protect the public interest when releasing or licensing data. Government information should be available to the public for review, and be available for unencumbered private or noncommercial derivative uses. However, agencies may restrict commercial use of data or charge fees to help recover the cost of data creation.

11.a    The Commonwealth should review all data sharing agreements and licenses

11.b    The Commonwealth should establish best practices for licensing government data

11.c    The Commonwealth should claim the specific copyright license on government data, reports, and other works and include citation guidelines

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