Google Map Maker links
The Scout Report has good links to CNET, Wired, and Wall Street Journal articles about Google's Map Maker project, as well as links to the American Memory Project and the David Rumsey Map Collection:
- With the release of Google Map Maker, users can contribute their own spatial knowledge, by Max Grinnell, The Scout Report (2011-04-22). In the previous millennium, those folks who wanted a high-quality map of their area might have had to go purchase or borrow an actual physical map. In recent years, online mapping tools and resources have sprouted like mushrooms after a hard rain. With all of that in mind, it is not so surprising that on Tuesday Google announced that it is allowing users to contribute changes to their very popular maps. This tool is called Google Map Maker...
The Elusive Prerequisite: Text Extraction
As we look to relying increasingly on digital texts for discovery, access, and use of government information, it is worth understanding the issues (and difficulties) in accurately extracting text from a variety of sources. Here is a thirteen page paper that outlines the issues.
- Herceg, Paul M., and Catherine N. Ball, Reliable Electronic Text: The Elusive Prerequisite for a Host of Human Language Technologies, Mitre Technical Report (Mitre, 30 September 2010). Electronic text is a prerequisite for text-processing applications such as indexing and search, named entity recognition (NER), and machine translation (MT). For example, text that is printed on paper must first be converted to electronic form to make it searchable--typically, by scanning the pages and using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to create electronic text. Not all electronic text is created equal, however. Electronic text comes in a wide variety of containers, from Microsoft Office documents to Oracle database records. Electronic text comes in a wide variety of character set encodings, such as Chinese "Big 5" or Unicode UTF-8. Electronic text may be written in any of the world's languages, including the special sublanguages of blogs, chat and forums. And from the end user's perspective, even formatting aspects of the electronic text may be important: for example, if the use case is translating a document for a customer, and the customer requires the translated document to be formatted to look like the original. From the application perspective, all aspects of electronic text potentially make a difference. Almost all products are language-specific, and will produce useful results only on supported languages. In terms of file types, some products accept Microsoft Word documents as input, while others may accept only plain text files. Some products may work best if all text is "normalized" to a single character set encoding such as UTF-8. The purpose of this paper is to explore factors to be considered when trying to match up text-containing files (in a variety of file formats, character set encodings, languages, etc.) with text-processing applications and use cases.
State not fulfilling its obligation to document foreign policy
"...and there is no foreseeable likelihood that it will do so..." Secrecy Overwhelms U.S. Historical Record, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (April 20th, 2011).
The [State] Department's "Foreign Relations of the United States" (FRUS) series is required to fully document the history of U.S. foreign policy no later than 30 years after the fact, but that’s not happening. "No progress has been made toward bringing the [FRUS] series into compliance with the statutory requirement that volumes be published 30 years after the events they document," said the new annual report of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.Continue reading
CIA finally declassifies last WWI era classified documents
So the CIA just got around to declassifying 6 of the U.S.'s oldest classified documents from WWI (1917 + 1918). They've posted them in their CIA FOIA reading room and the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) at the National Archives (but to use CREST, a researcher must physically be present at the National Archives, College Park, Maryland :-|). That also means that the documents will also soon be available at the archive-it FOIA collection (I'm harvesting them as we speak ;-)).
These documents, which describe secret writing techniques and are housed at the National Archives, are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA's purview to declassify. "These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them," CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said. "When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people." One document outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection. Another memorandum dated June 14, 1918 - written in French - reveals the formula used for German secret ink. "The CIA recognizes the importance of opening these historical documents to the public," said Joseph Lambert, the Agency's Director of Information Management Services. "In fiscal year 2010 alone, the Agency declassified and released over 1.1 million pages of documents."These documents, which describe secret writing techniques and are housed at the National Archives, are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA's purview to declassify. "These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them," CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said. "When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people." One document outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection. Another memorandum dated June 14, 1918 - written in French - reveals the formula used for German secret ink. "The CIA recognizes the importance of opening these historical documents to the public," said Joseph Lambert, the Agency's Director of Information Management Services. "In fiscal year 2010 alone, the Agency declassified and released over 1.1 million pages of documents."Declassified CIA documents (all pdf):
- Document 1
- Document 2
- Document 3
- Document 4 -- This is the one with the steps for checking for invisible ink.
- Document 5
- Document 6
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The Worst Government Website Ever
Sunlight has a story about the government's Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS) website that came online April 18th.
- The Worst Government Website We've Ever Seen?, by Tom Lee, Sunlight Foundation Blog (April 19, 2011). Contracting databases are part of the world of procurement, procurement is heavily influenced by the Defense Department, and DoD has a proud heritage of producing websites so ugly that they make you want to claw out your eyes. So FAPIIS has company. But if this was just a question of aesthetics, we wouldn't be complaining. Assuming you're using one of the few web browsers in which the site works at all (Chrome and Safari users are out of luck), the experience is off-putting from the start, as users are warned that their use of the site may be monitored, surveilled, or otherwise spied upon (you don't necessarily surrender your right to speak privately to your priest by using the website, though--thanks for clearing that up, guys!). Perhaps this is why their (arguably superfluous) SSL certificate is utterly broken....
[T]he use of a captcha to gate government data is outrageous. Government should be making its data more accessible and more machine-readable. Captchas are designed to interfere with automated tools that facilitate malicious acts. But downloading government data is decidedly not a malicious act. Why are we trying to limit machines' ability to use this data?Continue reading