Open Data Formats

I find it interesting that news of Minnesota's new proposed "open data format" requirements came up because I was just talking to a coworker about the Massachusetts requirements today. While short term it may be a bit of a pain for everyone, long term it will definitely be needed as things are otherwise going the direction of being locked up in proprietary formats with DRM and the vendor throwing DMCA complaints in the direction of anyone who even thinks about not paying for access to their own data.

I do find it interesting how far it's going though. Documents are usually addressed when discussions come up, but the interesting part is other media. That whole free to use in perpetuity is cool, but it rules out MPEG-2, MP3 and AAC as storage formats. While the licenses have come down since the pre-2002 dvd-player-software-not-bundled-with-drive days, it's still not free. The concept is nice on a philosophical level, but it's well past what the federal government has required for things like DTV (MPEG-2 and DD) which could have implications for how well it's accepted. Uncompressed formats such as WAV or YCbCr bitstreams aren't really reasonable for storage (or even transmission of HD content). One big catch is while Vorbis and FLAC are pretty far advanced and probably reasonable for audio, things like Xvid have iffy backgrounds and Theora doesn't seem to have a lot of support behind it yet. While the proprietary as the companies are solid and will be around and willing to support it is nice on one hand (IIRC the official reason why the FCC picked MPEG-2 for DTV, which disregards lobbying that likely took place), if it's free anyone can create an implementation of it. In case you didn't notice by the links to the open formats, a lot of the work in this regard for free stuff is being pushed through the Xiph.Org Foundation (the Ogg people). It seems there's enough support out there from the community in general and groups like Xiph.Org willing to back it up that it'd be possible. It'll be interesting to see how far it really goes, and what happens in the world of data formats if it stays mostly intact and other governmental organizations take similar approaches.

Information on H. F. No. 3971 from the MN House site for those interested.