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Legal Information Institutes: model for free open access.
Free public access to legal information has a long history going back to the earliest days of the Web. John Wonderlich describes some of the background in Legal Information as a Global Movement (Open House Project, May 27th, 2008), which also includes 3 videos about the movement. This is excellent, informative, and inspiring! Tom Bruce describes still more of the history here. Continue reading
Changes at USASearch.gov
This article describes changes coming next month as well as some long term thinking about the future of searching across federal, state, and local government web sites. The new changes are aimed at giving the managers of agency web sites a bit more control over how their results appear to users of USASearch.gov. A user searching for "passport" will be more assured of finding a link to State Department's latest information and instructions, for instance. The article also notes long term changes are possible. The five-year contract that USASearch.gov has with Vivisimo will be expiring in a couple of years and in the last two years "the industry's best search companies have opened their development platforms and made it much easier to access their indexes through common application programming interfaces." Currently, USASearch.gov uses Microsoft Live Search and Vivisimo.
- Widgets to the rescue, By Wyatt Kash, GCN, May 26, 2008. "USASearch.gov aims to make agency info easier to find with new spotlight tool."
Pentagon Audit of Iraq Spending
I always find it odd when news reports cite government documents without giving a link or good reference to them. It seems to me that this is something news web sites should do regularly. These reports are not always that easy to track down. Case in point: today's New York Times has a story about a Pentagon report:
- Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says, By James Glanz, New York Times, May 23, 2008
A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.Using Google to search on the title of the report plus "site:.gov" yields nothing this morning, although the report is available from two different government web sites. The report is available at the site of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Committee Holds Hearing on Accountability Lapses in Multiple Funds for Iraq, Wednesday, May 21, 2008, along with other statements and documents.
- Internal Controls Over Payments Made in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt, U.S. Defense Department, Office of the Inspector General, Report No. D-2008-098, (May 22, 2008).
Good news and bad news about UK GIS data
Today, some mixed good news/bad news about the availability of free public data in the UK. As we've noted here before (e.g., Privatized Data Woes in Britain and News from abroad: UK open statutes & RFID in Canadian coins and The Semantic Web + Government Information = Serendipitous Reuse) the British government sells limited-use licences to its GIS data on a cost recovery basis. Now, as part of a proposed national geoportal, the UK would "create a single point of entry on the web to data held by public bodies such as local councils, Ordnance Survey (OS), the British Geological Survey and the Environment Agency." But, as the story says, "A new system will make geospatial information available without charge - yet we'll still have to pay."
- An Inspired debate on access, by Michael Cross, The Guardian, May 22 2008.
First, some very good news. Civil servants revealed last week that the British government has begun work on a system to make all the geospatial data it holds on the natural environment available for free inspection and re-use. Now the bad news. In this context, "free" means we will still have to pay to download much key data, especially if it is to be published or otherwise used commercially.Continue reading
Five blogs worth reading
Federal Computer Week (FCW) profiles 4 government blogs and one non-government blog that they find worth reading here: 5 blogs worth reading, FCW, May 12, 2008. For each one they give a description, notes on how often it is updated and why it is worth reading, and sample entries. 1. The Impact of IT on Businesses and Their Leaders 2. Department of Health and Human Services blog 3. Congressional Budget Office Director’s Blog 4. DipNote 5. Navy Department CIO blog Continue reading
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