...or data packages. [laughs]
Right. As of next month, this will be our procurement requirement, so that any mission-facing part of the new procurement must now declare their JSON schema. As part of the procurement validation process, this now will be machine validated. We’ll run a schema validator, an API validator.
Unless it becomes green, they don’t get this part in their score card. If multiple vendors bid for government procurement, those with the validatable schema wins, basically.
In that case, instead of "open license," what would you say?
Say it was the open format. Would that make it better? Open license? Open format? Open access?
Then taken together...
That’s right.
Open access has the academic meaning, but its meaning actually overlaps a lot, which was what we’re saying here.
[laughs]
It’s much more writable. It’s much more readable. However, it’s still a black box.
It’s parts of a project, as I showed, so that each component...
What I’m saying is that, the individual sub-components, as we are now essentially mandating decoupled architecture for procurement. So already, the back-ends, the middle tier and the front-end must talk with APIs.
If they’re very brittle and they break, the whole service breaks. It’s sensitive to keep this...
No, that’s fine. I do agree.
That is the trend.
It’s a trend.
What you’re saying is that, if we say import and export, which means bulk, essentially, what’s the term for that? It’s not portable data, because "portable data" are more like My Data, it only means personal.
Well, if it’s machine-written, is it still expensive?
You mean, creating new APIs. OK. But S3 is a very uniform API.
Agreed. It’s the same format basically for any...
That’s just fine. Which is why I ask, if I can switch to say "open formats."
What you’re saying is that API has his cultural connotation of "Freemium" in it.
It’s called the "API economy." Go ahead.
On this I have something to say, but please continue.
Over individual, granular, APIs.
But what you store on S3, may also be either individual records, or even the granularity itself...
That’s my favorite style.
That’s because of the disk cost. It’s now essentially zero, compared to the bandwidth.
By ID, by user, whatever, right?
Which one in the picture?
Yeah?
The data’s still there.
That’s exactly right. I agree with the whole argument.
I do completely agree. If I may just recap a little bit. First, we don’t call this scenario open API. We stop calling this open API. We say, this is a government, for example this person may very well be another government. Let’s call this another ministry.
In this scenario, which is, they have a well-defined whatever, API, to connect to one government database to another government service, which then talks to people. This makes it a round-trip whatever.
Then, when we say this, what we’re also saying is that this, because it’s well-structured -- it’s got a JSON schema, whatever -- we encouraged them to run a API proxy here. So that it can do a lot of extraction and transformation...
By the second year of this integration running, we expect that the revision here will be relatively solidified. Then, once it does that, we basically take a snapshot saying, "OK, now we know these views are free of privacy issues, FOIA-compatible."
Then the checkbox, what I mentioned before, can be checked. Then, we take this, and then make an open data repository out of the now-frozen part of this. Then this switches to this scenario, where it’s not dependent on the original data store anymore
Of course.
What we’re saying is that because this is frozen, we can take the DDL of here, and then we say, this, the DDL, it’s now the canonical metadata.
Now, it goes here. Because the DDL is an exact mirror of this, the proxy can just reconfigure their upstream sources here.
That requires zero line of source code changes.
In Taiwan, we have two words. We have 公開, which is the freedom of information access, which is read only, and we say 開放, which means it permits derived work.
We have two words for this. So when we say 開放API, it implies an open format with an open license. For a "clean" format we would probably say 結構化. Maybe that’s...
By the way, we don’t have the "free software" ambiguity in Chinese. (自由 is "freedom"; 免費 is "gratis".)
Yeah, open also works for software here. (開源軟體 for "open-source software")
...the DDLs.
So you’re proposing to establish a standard operation procedure for ALTER TABLEs.
