Big Data Success in Government by Alex Olesker.
From the post:
On January 19, Carahsoft hosted a webinar on Big Data success in government with Bob Gourley and Omer Trajman of Cloudera. Bob began by explaining the current state of Big Data in the government. There are 4 areas of significant activity in Big Data. Federal integrators are making large investments in research and development of solutions. Large firms like Lockhead Martin as well as boutique organizations have made major contributions. The Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community have been major adopters of Big Data solutions to handle intelligence and information overload. Typically, they use Big Data technology to help analysts “connect the dots” and “find a needle in a haystack.” The national labs under the Department of Energy have been developing and implementing Big Data solutions for research as well, primarily in the field of bioinformatics, the application of computer science to biology. This ranges from organizing millions of short reads to sequence a genome to better tracking of patients and treatments. The last element in government use of Big Data are the Office of Management and Budget and the General Service Administration, which primarily ensure the sharing of lessons and solutions.
Just background reading that may give you some ideas on where in government to pitch semantic integration using topic maps or other technologies, such as graph databases.
Remember that no matter how the elections turn out this year, the wheels are turning for “consolidation” of government offices and IT is going to be in demand to make that “consolidation” work.
You may be a “boutique organization,” and unable to afford a member of Congress but most agencies have small contractor officers (I don’t think they call them boutique officers) who are supposed to parcel out some work to smaller firms. Doesn’t hurt to call.