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Ask YC: Retaining the Authenticity of Government Data
The government is currently considering a major overhaul of its public data services, making a wide assortment of APIs available for developer use.
It's all being held up by a concern that there will be no way for end-users to be able to discern the real data from manipulated or made-up data.
Are you aware of any best-practices for avoiding this problem, but also allowing the data to be freely available?
- jamslevy 18y agoLink to the story: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ProgrammableWeb/~3/314354508/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ProgrammableWeb/~3/314354508/
- bayareaguy 18y agoThey could just publish a few public keys and use them to digitally sign the data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Signature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Signature
- babyshake 18y agoBut digital signatures would require some baked-in solution that would be problematic in some respects, like limiting access from unsupported platforms. As far as I know, there's no clear way of maintaining the integrity of the data without keeping it in some sort of walled garden. Am i wrong?
- DenisM 18y agoTo help you in your quest, the problem space is called "data provenance" - information about origination, history and trustworthiness of the data. There's been plenty of research about this topic recently.