Kundra: Data.gov Expansion Planned
NextGov's Aliya Sternstein reports that a comprehensive online warehouse of downloadable federal statistics is expected soon to add clickable tags that allow users to search and catalog related content. "We want to be able to get multiple tagging. We've seen in social networking, that's been extremely useful," White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said of the features coming in a few months to the next version of Data.gov. Toward the end of June, Kundra's office also will unveil a publicly accessible Web application that will quantify the progress of federal IT programs, allowing taxpayers to see whether the projects are on schedule and within budget. "We're going to power a lot of that through Data.gov," he said Thursday. "The idea is it's better to create platforms that are horizontal in nature, [but] what I don't want to do is give the impression that this is all going to happen overnight."
The goal of the government data depot, which launched May 21, is to encourage nongovernment users to mash agency information with other data sets to generate new services and sites and to enhance search engines. For instance, a real estate developer could map the migration patterns of wildlife, obtained through a live data feed from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, on top of blueprints to pinpoint areas where construction could harm the ecosystem. But the government's outdated information technology systems prohibit much of that innovation now, Kundra stressed. "The federal government has over 10,000 systems and a lot of these systems are old," he said, noting that eventually the government will need to transition to hardware and software that can provide real-time feeds. "What we want to make sure is that we bake all of that [transparency] into new procurements."
Read the full story here.
Categories:
E-Government
Join the Discussion
The National Journal Group has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate.
Comments powered by Disqus