Lost Conversations, Lost Decisions, Lost History
Oliver Bell summarizes the issue of new forms of government communication and the need for new ways of preserving them:
- Lost Conversations, Lost Decisions, Lost History..., by Oliver Bell, TalkStandards (November 13, 2009)
Work needs to begin on archiving standards that will retain the information that is driving decisions today and as technology plays an increasingly larger role in the business of government archiving standards needs to be a core part of systems design, not a problem that we try and solve after the fact.One important element of this issue is Title 44 of the US Code that defines what GPO and the FDLP can handle. Its definitions limit what we can archive within those boundaries of the FDLP. But... if we had digital deposit, GPO could deposit official Title-44-approved content in FDLP digital libraries and those libraries could combine that content with non-Title-44 (Gov-2.0) content. GPO can't do this because of the limits of Title 44, but individual FDLP libraries have the flexibility to build their own collections combining Title 44 content with other content. We can do this today without changing the law. But we need digital deposit to make those collections rich and useful. Continue reading
A Smart Tool For Informal Government Blogging?
When technology makes a difference: How about a blog that uses email as a way of posting? "For government employees, it could be a breath of life in an otherwise locked-down state of cybersecurity affairs. "
- Why Posterous Is a Smart Tool For Informal Government Blogging, by Mark Drapeau, O'Reilly Radar (Oct 19, 2009).
Confused about RDF? Semantic Web? Linked Data? Don’t be. Read this!
Here is an excellent article on these important technologies:
- The Web's next act: A worldwide database. by Jackson, Joab. Government Computer News, November 9, 2009.
...the idea of machine-readable data can be a hard sell to people who are unfamiliar with the idea. The idea of Linked Data, like the idea of a World Wide Web when it was first introduced, "solves a problem we didn't know we had," said Ronald Reck, head of consulting firm Rrecktek. In other words, many of the benefits offered by the then-nascent Web, such as the ability to share documents, was already offered through other technologies, such as the File Transfer Protocol. Likewise, it is difficult to understand the concept of a single format for Web-based data when plenty of formats such as relational databases and spreadsheets already annotate data in ways that make it reusable by other systems. ...Berners-Lee said that to use an API, a systems administrator or developer must write a program for the data to be accessible. With RDF, a Web browser should be able to reuse the data, requiring no additional work on the part of users.See also: 13 resources for government Linked Data. 2 examples of how government data linking can work. Continue reading
Data.gov.uk Launches Soon!
Looks like the UK version of data.gov, developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is going to be released soon. It is "language-based" where "linkages are based on human language, rather than hard-coded hyperlinks", a.k.a. the Semantic Web concept that Berners-Lee has been touting for years. I like the way Nancy Scola of Personal Democracy Forum describes the Semantic Web:
[Berners-Lee] vision is of a web that understands the connections between disparate bits of information in a way similar to how the human mind might effortlessly connect an address on London's Whitehall with the events of World War II that Winston Churchill directed from an underground bunker there. Data woven through with more human ways of interpretation might, just might, make the gap between making government information public and making it useful a little smaller.The BBC reports that "Data.gov.uk is built with semantic web technology, which will enable the data it offers to be drawn together into links and threads as the user searches...we will also be able to look for patterns...visitors to data.gov.uk will want to make their own mash-ups from the information available." Yes, and we should be making mashups from our country's data.gov for our library patrons too! Let's get to it! I'll be working on mine and will show you how it can be done. Continue reading
DataTO.org
Check out DataTO.org, which is similar to data.gov, but users request data sets from the Toronto municipal government. The first phase of the website will allow one to:
...publish a request for data to the community, where members can comment and rate the request. In future iterations of this site, publishers and others will be able to post details of known and existing data sources so that community members can rate them for prioritization. Users will then be able to find data sources that have been published.Kudos to O'Reilly Radar. Continue reading