egov LD demo

Quick summary of the Linked Data Demo project, so far:

    - I'm writing this because George Thomas, who agreed to coordinate
      this and help drive it, has been away for the past three weeks.  I
      want to help make sure we're on the same page when he gets back.

    - Michael Hausenblas from DERI and Li Ding from RPI have expressed
      that their groups [1][2] intend to keep building demos, and they
      are eager for input from folks who know what demos will be most
      compelling and effective.   So that's great.

    - We've been talking about working in the IT Dashboard space [3],
      looking at how money is spent in govt.  It has the great advantage
      of being familiar and salient to decision makers.  It has the
      disadvantage that there's already a lot of software in this space.

    - Exactly what LD can offer here isn't yet clear to me.  Largely
      what RPI has so far demonstrated, I think, is that LD allows very
      rapid development: a grad student in a few hours can develop
      data investigation apps that might have taken months with
      conventional tools.  I'm not sure this pitch is compelling to
      everyone; there are always new tools that claim to offer enormous
      leaps in productivity.

    - The biggest payoff is probably in bringing in diverse data from
      diverse sources, being able to compare one project with similar
      projects in other governments and in other industies, being able
      to correlate with other data (the phase of the moon?  :-) and
      generally allowing local control of data.

Thoughts?   Reactions?

     -- Sandro

[1] http://www.deri.ie/
[2] http://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu/wiki/Demos
[3] http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/data-feeds

Received on Friday, 26 February 2010 13:49:48 UTC