My third open data “parable”. You can read the first and second ones here. With apologies to Borges.
. . . In that Empire, the Art of Information attained such Perfection that the data of a single City occupied the entirety of a Spreadsheet, and the datasets of the Empire, the entirety of a Portal. In time, those Unconscionable Datasets no longer satisfied, and the Governance Guilds struck a Register of the Empire whose coverage was that of the Empire, and which coincided identifier for identifier with it. The following Governments, who were not so fond of the Openness of Data as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast register was Valuable, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Voraciousness of Privatisation and Monopolies. In the Repositories of the Net, still today, there are Stale Copies of that Data, crowd-sourced by Startups and Citizens; in all the Commons there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Transparency.
Sharon More, The data roads less travelled. London, 2058.
Lost Boy 