

Ask YC: Retaining the Authenticity of Government Data - jamslevy

The government is currently considering a major overhaul of its public data services, making a wide assortment of APIs available for developer use.<p>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.<p>Are you aware of any best-practices for avoiding this problem, but also allowing the data to be freely available?
======
bayareaguy
They could just publish a few public keys and use them to digitally sign the
data.

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

------
DenisM
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.

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

------
babyshake
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?

