Tomorrow Eric is presenting on open data at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, focusing on “What Open Data Looks Like to the Rest of Us: Examples of Government Data in Use”. His presentation will span from our developers perspective on working with government data in Washington, DC’s Apps for Democracy contest to our experience working with really large government data sets - like the U.S. Census TIGER data that we worked with Amazon.com to host in their cloud. He’ll also go into some technical details, explaining the difference between open and accessible and discussing preferred data formats and ways to promote the usage of open data.

The second half of his presentation will focus on what it means to work with sensitive pubic data, using the example of election monitoring data to highlight specific strategies. During this portion of the presentation, Eric will give a sneak peak at a private site developed for the National Democratic Inistitute that visualizes election results from the recent presidential election in Afghanistan, which was heavily marred by fraud. He’ll also discuss the challenges of working with data sets that are actively changing and about how to use open data sets for making maps, which were a key part of this project. Eric will end the presentation by talking about how open source tools help to open up data, and why PDFs are the anti-open data format.

If you’re at the Web 2.0 Expo, stop by to see the presentation or look for Eric afterward to discuss open data in more detail.