Two years ago a colleague let their dog swim in a lake without paying attention to the information signs. It turned out the water was infested with a type of algae that caused the dog irritation. Since then my colleague thought it would be great if you could somehow subscribe to notifications of when the quality of status of some nearby surface water changes.
Recently this colleague took a look at the provincial external communications concerning swimming waters. A provincial government has specific public tasks in designating swimming waters and monitoring its quality. It turns out there are six (6) public information or data sources from the particular province my colleague lives in concerning swimming waters.
My colleague compared those 6 datasets on a number of criteria: factual correctness, comparability based on an administrative index or key, and comparability on spatial / geographic aspects. Factual correctness here means whether the right objects have been represented in the data sets. Are the names, geographic location, status (safe, caution, unsafe) correct? Are details such as available amenities represented correctly everywhere?
A lake (photo by facemepls, license CC-BY)
As it turns out each of the 6 public data sets contains a different number of objects. The 6 data sets cannot be connected based on a unique key or ID. Slightly more than half of the swimming waters can be correlated across the 6 data sets by name, but a spatial/geographic connection isn’t always possible. 30% of swimming waters have the wrong status (safe/caution/unsafe) on the provincial website! And 13% of swimming waters are wrongly represented geometrically, meaning they end up in completely wrong locations and even municipalities on the map.
Every year at the start of the year the provincial government takes a decision which designates the public swimming waters. Yet the decision from this province cannot be found online (even though it was taken last February, and publication is mandatory). Only a draft decision can be found on the website of one of the municipalities concerned.
The differences in the 6 data sets are more or less reflective of the internal division of tasks of the province. Every department keeps its own files, and dataset. One is responsible for designating public swimming waters, another for monitoring swimming water quality. Yet another for making sure those swimming waters are represented in overall public planning / environmental plans. Another for the placement and location of information signs about the water quality, and still another for placing that same information on the website of the province. Every unit has their own task and keeps their own data set for it.
Which ultimately means large inconsistencies internally, and a confusing mix of information being presented to the public.