PATENTS ARE A CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED DATABASE

While government distribution of data has much improved since we ventured into the field in 1994, many agencies still balk at releasing their databases in bulk. We think a foundation of public access to public information is ftp of zip or tar files of the entire database of each agency. Agencies don't make their data available this way because the databases often serve as a revenue source and it is argued that the databases are so large that people won't know what to do with them. Needless to say, using public information as a revenue source violates both the Paperwork Reduction Act and OMB Directive No. A-130. And, an easy solution to database size and bandwidth is to use mirror servers, like our own bulk.resource.org.

In 2001, we began some serious work on two projects that are at the core of our current programs. IMS commissioned a group of Romanian open source programmers to develop the SpaceMapper scripting language, a language used to scrape HTML pages and convert them into XML which is part of our Core Technologies Program. We also spent most of the year studying the technology, policy, and markets in the area of Electronic Program Guides, the area addressed by our NetTopBox Program.

URL: http://bulk.resource.org/