Ask YC: Retaining the Authenticity of Government Data

3 points by jamslevy 18y ago ↗ HN

The government is currently considering a major overhaul of its public data services, making a wide assortment of APIs available for developer use.

It's all being held up by a concern that there will be no way for end-users to be able to discern the real data from manipulated or made-up data.

Are you aware of any best-practices for avoiding this problem, but also allowing the data to be freely available?

4 comments

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jamslevy 18y ago ↗

Link to the story: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ProgrammableWeb/~3/314354508/

bayareaguy 18y ago ↗

They could just publish a few public keys and use them to digitally sign the data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Signature

babyshake 18y ago ↗

But digital signatures would require some baked-in solution that would be problematic in some respects, like limiting access from unsupported platforms.

As far as I know, there's no clear way of maintaining the integrity of the data without keeping it in some sort of walled garden. Am i wrong?

DenisM 18y ago ↗

To help you in your quest, the problem space is called "data provenance" - information about origination, history and trustworthiness of the data. There's been plenty of research about this topic recently.