Liberate Crime Data: Just Say No to PDF
SpotCrime is mapping crime data from hundreds of police agencies which means large-scale consumption in many different formats. PDF (portable format document) is an antiquated file format still being used by agencies nationwide. PDF’s came about in the early 1990's with the introduction of the World Wide Web and gave the ability see full documents sent via e-mail. No matter what operating system being used, the document is digitally accessible and looks uniform to all viewers. In the '90's it was favorable technology. However, in today's standards, public data and information locked behind a PDF is disastrous. Go behind the scenes of any company that maintains a database and find that data needs to be uploaded to the database in a machine readable format. Digitally accessible documents, like PDFs, are not machine readable. According to Data.gov , ‘a digitally accessible document may be online, making it easier for a human to access it via a computer,