This could be solved, at least in theory, by having cities write contracts (and RFPs) that specify performance for their vendors that include APIs for civic data.

I don’t know what that RFP language would look like, though..

Ed

I agree, I think the term “data friction” is superb, and with permission, would like to use it, with attribution, in some of my own analyses.

This is also a remarkably good plug for the use of standardized serialization formats: xml or json in particular. The challenge with the relational database model is that serialization was considered an afterthought, and as such, the opportunity to standardize on such a format was lost early – it was really only once people started passing xml around that its potential as a mechanism for data serialization re-raised the question of how to get data (real or virtual) from a data store to a data consumer.

Screen scraping to me is much akin to extreme sports – fraught with legal and moral peril, appealing to those with more cajones than brains, and increasingly unnecessary. That it is still somewhat necessary attests, as you point out, to the rather sorry state of data serialization on the web.

Be interested in your views on my attempt to reduce the friction.

http://www.screencast.com/t/xhH3CwoRKTW