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Princeton Researchers Say Feds Need Data Standard
dcblogs writes "The federal government's data-sharing efforts are a mess, and if Barack Obama really wants a useful 'Google for government,' he would have to set the government's vast amount of data free by exposing it and ensuring it complies to standards. Once that happens, commercial sites, aggregators, bloggers and everyone else will be able to access it, use it and transform it, argue a group of Princeton researchers (follow Download link for full PDF)."
We are not talking about the government sharing data on individual citizens or on military secrets. We are talking about things involving government spending, contracts, loans, grants, etc. Things that citizens should have access to, but have trouble organizing.
Palm trees and 8
"The District of Columbia is far ahead of its federal government overlord in bringing data to standard XML formats and RSS-enabling it. DC's government has what it calls a "data catalog" offering live data feeds of crime reports, construction reports, building permits and many other types of information. "
I can see some that if not screened carefully could cause problems in this "sharing" environment.
Also don't forget there have been examples were citizen information has accidentally been leaked. Soon retracted but "sharing" only means the mistake propagates faster.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
The United States Army uses 'PureEdge' which i guess was replaced by IBM with 'Lotus Forms' as there is no canonical link to the software anymore. Its an XML based form system. Its not really used in any standard way, other than electronically saving forms, and filling stuff in before printing the forms. It could though, because the Army, at least, does little to no documentation that isn't on some kind of standardized form. Now that the forms are machine parsable, I can definitely see the fed adoption some kind of organization and retrieval system.
The problem with that is, that the government doesn't want to organize its documentation that well. Obfuscation is still a large part of information security in certain circles, and the possibility of leak is much greater when information flows so fluidly. Unclassified does not mean its not of a sensitive nature, it just means that it doesn't fall under any of the standard security classifications. Thus the reason why we shred EVERYTHING.
Its archaic, but not necessarily ineffective.