| William H. Magill on Wed, 9 Apr 2003 15:53:05 -0400 |
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On Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 02:41 PM, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote: On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 10:46:27AM -0400, Edmund Goppelt wrote:I'd like Philadelphians to be able to look up land ownership records.Is it, at present, possible for us to do this by USPS? No, you have to physically go to the office to do the lookup. Is there a law saying we should be able to?No. The information is public record and is available to the public as required. It's just not available without visiting City Hall, and not available electronically. [That it is available to "some" electronically, raises a VERY interesting legal question, especially it it is being given to them for free.] It turns out the City already has a web site that offers this information. For three years, a group of 50 private companies have been able to look at deed images and related info. at no cost, by going here: That would not have been even close to legal. It's called buying City Services and is lovingly prosecuted by both the DA and State Attorney General because they can get lots of six o'clock face time with an easy win. The City is required to charge the same fees to everyone for whatever service they provide. I would suggest that the State Attorney General might be more interested, than the local DA. Why can't they just use the one of those license they hopefully preserved to do a SQL dump of their Oracle tablespace and had that to you on CD? (I presume there's no IP issues... this is all public information, right?). The fact that it is available to certain commercial entities for free (who undoubtedly have contributed to the "Party") does raise interesting questions of another nature... see above. And no, they didn't "contribute" to construction of the database, but yes, they did "contribute." Don't forget, all this is about politics not technology. The Records Commissioner is a political appointee, and is not going to do anything unless she is told to do so. Initiative is NOT something which is rewarded in political circles... This is especially true when it is to the Politician's advantage to make information either nonexistent or extremely hard to get. Wheeling and dealing (or what the French call "Diplomacy") can only take place in back rooms out of public scrutiny. Otherwise, far too many people ask, "Why did this person get that deal?" It's a stick (or carrot, depending on your point of view) they hold over you. 1. Doing so would overburden the City's Internet connection. I don't know that the "City's" Internet connection is involved here. For one thing, the City has multiple connections and multiple "inter and intra" nets. However, it does not have its own "MAN/WAN." As recently as three years ago, the city still had nothing vaguely resembling a coherent "computerization" plan, let alone a networking plan." And no structure to implement what little it did have. (And forget about funding.) [Don't forget, the "City" is different from individual departments. Some Departments are better than others.] The City's main web site (www.phila.gov) and this one are the same, and both are outsourced. And interestingly, the Department of Records website is copyrighted by that outsourcing company, Eagle Computer Systems ... which, quite interestingly has no Pennsylvania connection... although they do claim to be a significant provider of this type of service to other government entities around the country. "ECS/Tyler is a software development and services company based in Driggs, Idaho and Eagle, Colorado, and sales offices located in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Paradise, California." Sounds true to me.2. Their license with Oracle Corporation restricted them to 50 named users (i.e., not simultaneous users, but the same 50 people). My understanding of the "standard" Oracle license is that you can have only X number of Named individuals with WRITE/UPDATE access to the database, but an infinite number of read only users, and more importantly, no user can be associated with a web based interface (that requires a separate license). Of course, Oracle changes terms as often as some people change socks, and I haven't dealt with a license for about 5 years now. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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