In the wake of the pet food contamination recall crisis, where pets are being poisoned from pet food, a database created by veterinarian Dr. Marty Becker has gotten a lot of attention. Good things:
- It’s great that someone other than the government is collecting this information
- It’s great that they link to the FDA site– government/private cooperation
But
- They only display the aggregate numbers
- No ability for others to analyze the data
- No geographic representation of the data
Tools like Google Maps and Frappr make it easy to do more with data. Data presented publicly can be analyzed by the crowd, making for more connections, more thinking. Publicly collected data ought to be displayed publicly.