A Look Into Linking Government Data
From the post:
Due out next month from Springer Publishing is Linking Government Data, a book that highlights some of the leading-edge applications of Linked Data to problems of government operations and transparency. David Wood, CTO of 3RoundStones and co-chair of the W3C RDF Working Group, writes and edits the volume, which includes contributions from others exploring the intersection of government and the Semantic Web.
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Some of the hot spots for this are down under, in Australia and New Zealand. The U.K., of course, also has done extremely well, with the data.gov.uk portal an acknowledged leader in LOD efforts – and certainly comfortably ahead of the U.S. data.gov site.
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He also thinks it’s worth noting that, just because you might not see a country openly publishing its data as Linked Data, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there. Often someone, somewhere – even if it’s just at one government agency — is using Linked Data principles, experimentally or in real projects. “Like commercial organizations, governments often use them internally and not publish externally,” he notes. “The spectrum of adoption can be individual or a trans-government mandate or everything in between.”
OK, but you would think if there were some major adoption, it would be mentioned in a post promoting the book. Australia, New Zealand and Nixon’s “Silent Majority” in the U.S. are using linked data. Can’t see them but they are there. That’s like RIAA music piracy estimates, just sheer fiction for all but true believers.
But as far as the U.S.A., the rhetoric shifts from tangible benefit to “can lead to,” “can save money,” etc.:
The economics of the Linked Data approach, Wood says, show unambiguous benefit. Think of how it can save money in the U.S. on current expenditures for data warehousing. And think of the time- and productivity-savings, for example, of having government information freely available on the web in a standard format in a way that can be reused and recombined with other data. In the U.S., “government employees wouldn’t have to divert their daily work to answer Freedom of Information requests because the information is proactively published,” he says. It can lead to better policy decisions because government researchers wouldn’t have to spend enormous amounts of time trying to integrate data from multiple agencies in varying formats to combine it and find connections between, for example, places where people live and certain kinds of health problems that may be prevalent there.
And democracy and society also profit when it’s easy for citizens to access published information on where the government is spending their money, or when it’s easy for scientists and researchers to get data the government collects around scientific efforts so that it can be reused for purposes not originally envisioned.
“Unambiguous benefit” means that we have two systems, one using practice Y and other using practice X and when compared (assuming the systems are comparable): there is a clear different of Z% of some measurable metric that can be attributed to the different practices.
Yes?
Personally I think linked data can be beneficial but that is subject to measurement and demonstration in some particular context.
As soon as this work is released, I would appreciate pointers to unambiguous benefit shown by comparison of agencies in the U.S.A. doing comparable work with some metric that makes that demonstration. But that has to be more than speculation or “can.”