Standardizing Federal Transparency
From the post:
A new federal data transparency coalition is pushing for standardization of government documents and support for legislation on public records disclosures, taxpayer spending and business identification codes.
The Data Transparency Coalition announced its official launch Monday, vowing nonpartisan work with Congress and the Executive Branch on ventures toward digital publishing of government documents in a standardized and integrated formats. As part of that effort, the coalition expressed its support of legislative proposals such as: the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which would open public spending records published on a single digital format; the Public Information Online Act, which pushes for all records to be released digitally in a machine-readable format; and the Legal Entity Identifier proposal, creating a standard ID code for companies.
The 14 founding members include vendors Microsoft, Teradata, MarkLogic, Rivet Software, Level One Technologies and Synteractive, as well as the Maryland Association of CPAs, financial advisory BrightScope, and data mining and pattern discovery consultancy Elder Research. The coalition board of advisors includes former U.S. Deputy CTO Beth Noveck, data and information services investment firm partner Eric Gillespie and former Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board Chairman Earl E. Devaney.
Data Transparency Coalition Executive Director Hudson Hollister, a former counsel for the House of Representatives and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, noted that when the federal government does electronically publish public documents it “often fails to adopt consistent machine-readable identifiers or uniform markup languages.”
Sounds like an opportunity for both the markup and semantic identity communities, topic maps in particular.
Reasoning not only will there need to be mappings between vocabularies and entities but also between “uniform markup languages” as they evolve and develop.