Welcome to the era of big, bad open information. Context needed. — Tech News and Analysis

Some cities already share the data they generate in order to stimulate problem solving. New York City is creating community with its NY Big Apps project, an annual competition to develop new applications using the open data database. It also challenges organizations to add their own data as well. The aim is to improve the lives of citizens in the Big Apple, and to promote innovation and economic development. Similar projects exist in the city of Zaragoza, and with the European Open Cities App Challenge that awards funding and resources to individuals and companies for finding new ways to solve urban problems. In another example, the District of Columbia police department decided to publish local crime statistics as open data; however, the data was unformatted and only useful when someone could translate it into a map that could feed a smartphone app. For example, developers created an app called Are you Safe? that alerts you when you are entering a dangerous zone ... But open data is nothing without context. A friend of mine lives in one of the pioneer cities of open data in Spain. He likes running, and one day when he found it was harder to breathe he wondered if the pollution had increased. He checked the air quality parameters published by the municipality, but understood nothing. While the data were available to the public, there was no context for comparison. So he spent three days reading an environmental European Union Directive to discover that several parameters of the air pollution levels in his city were outside the limits.  So while it is true that we have access to more information than ever before, we are not experts on every subject. Thus, it is very difficult to digest it. My concern is that over-information the new way of hiding information.   The best way to combat disinformation is to demand context for all data, the 'fact-checking journalism' promoted by sites like Gapminder or Open Knowledge.  Visualizing.org strives to make sense of issues through data and design with a collection site where designers and all sorts of organizations can upload and share open data sets ..."