Its all about the back end

David Eaves : Creating effective open government portals. Amen to that.

Here is the thing...most http://data.[whatever] websites are only as good as their ability to serve up fresh content. That oftentimes means that re-thinking back-end processes is required. Otherwise a one-off data dump happens to get things rolling but then...

Nothing kills a web-o-data project so ruthlessly as information latency.

Machine readable content - even more so than human readable content - must be current.