Slashdot Mirror
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)."
I'm not certain I would agree with setting it all free. However it all does need to be standardized.
As for the rest. WEB 2.0!
One thought has occurred to me as part of this "sharing". Privacy and the other is Security.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
It is more a question of whether or not citizens will be able to access government data in a meaningful way. If the government wants to standardize its data, it can, assuming it contracts with a company that actually knows what it is doing (this is the real hitch). Government employees need to be able to continue doing what they normally do, and have the standardization happen automatically -- such as a MS .doc to ODF converter that silently makes the conversion whenever a file is saved, or another tool that automatically indexes files as they are saved. Such things already exist, it is just a matter of implementing on the scale of the government.
Palm trees and 8
The government could hire librarians to organize the data. This is are a group of people highly trained in how to take large quantities of non standard data and organize it in a way that people can find what they want.