Efforts for Open Government Forge Ahead
January 3, 2013
Openness and transparency are huge themes across the globe in terms of government, in addition to many other industries and businesses. The UK concentrated on pushing their efforts in this direction over the last few years and we are seeing a similar push for it on this side of the pond. Open government is discussed in more detail in the recent Semantic Web article, “oeGOV: Open Government Through Semantic Web Technologies.”
One of the initial efforts in the U.S. has been Barack Obama’s memo to the heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. Since that memo, there have been a number of related initiatives. It seems that transparency and accountability have been used as synonymous concepts in many of these cases.
The article informs us:
“Placing increasing amounts of raw data on the Web is a good first step towards government transparency. But for it to be truly useful it needs to be connectable. Since data coming from different sources is idiosyncratic, connecting across data sets today requires heroic efforts from brigades of programmers. To truly support the transparency goals, government data needs to be Findable, Interpretable, Decidable and Actionable, in short FIDA-friendly.”
We completely agree that FIDA represents a good set of goals to shoot for, however the issues of standardization and implementation remain. Additionally, we find this all extremely interesting in reference to recent surveillance decisions related to the “open” Internet.
Megan Feil, January 03, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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