Danny Palmer of Computing.co.uk reports, “US President Barack Obama has signed an executive order that requires government agencies to make publicly accessible data open and machine readable. ‘Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable,’ reads the Open Data Policy order. In 2009, Obama pledged to make his administration the most open in the history of US government. The administration hopes that innovators, including researchers and entrepreneurs, will be able to examine and use the data to benefit the country.” Read more

MODENA, ITALY–(Marketwired – April 24, 2013) - Expert System, the semantic technology company, today introduces its newest solution, the Cogito Intelligence API, bringing advanced semantic functions to enable Government and Corporate Security analysts to access and exploit their most strategic sources of information.

Cogito Intelligence API is available for free proof of concept testing, with volume pricing and annual subscription levels. The API enables Government, Intelligence, Law Enforcement Agencies and enterprise Corporate Security functions to add semantic processing, text mining, categorization and tagging features to their analysis platforms and applications for faster evaluation of intelligence data. Read more

Joshua Sabatini of The San Francisco Examiner reports, “San Francisco has fallen behind in the open-data movement, but city officials say a new proposal will once again put it on the forefront. Three years ago, The City adopted its first open-data ordinance to encourage departments to release their data sets — i.e., restaurant health scores or details on special events in The City. But the effort appears to have wilted, and cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Chicago have since created more aggressive initiatives than San Francisco. ‘Unfortunately we have fallen a little bit behind,’ said Board of Supervisors President David Chiu. ‘We have about 500 city-maintained data sets. But there are literally thousands of data sets that we could put out to the public’.” Read more

Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar reports, “GitHub has been gaining new prominence as the use of open source software in government grows. Earlier this month, I included a few thoughts from Chicago’s chief information officer, Brett Goldstein, about the city’s use of GitHub, in a piece exploring GitHub’s role in government. While Goldstein says that Chicago’s open data portal will remain the primary means through which Chicago releases public sector data, publishing open data on GitHub is an experiment that will be interesting to watch, in terms of whether it affects reuse or collaboration around it. In a followup email, Goldstein, who also serves as Chicago’s chief data officer, shared more about why the city is on GitHub and what they’re learning. Our discussion follows.” Read more

David Meyer of GigaOM reports, “IBM and Deutsche Telekom, the carrier behind the T-Mobile brand, are to work together on creating smart city systems, the companies have announced. The smart city concept, which is closely related to the internet of things, is reliant on pervasive connectivity, drawing on what has traditionally been known as machine-to-machine (M2M) technology to hook up everything from traffic lights to public transport vehicles to the local broadband network. This usually involves the use of cellular networks.” Read more

ISS has been selected for a $249 million US Air Force contract. According to the article, “ISS is one of seven prime contractors selected for the Multiple Award Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) contract. The five year delivery order contract, through the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., will support the replacement of Theater Battle Management Core Systems (TBMCS), as well as development of Air Force C2 applications and information services for air, space, and cyberspace domains. It will address needs across the full software lifecycle, from concept development through fielding and sustainment. The work will provide architecture and functionality improvements, vastly improving warfighter productivity compared to existing systems that in some instances are leveraging technology initially fielded more than a decade ago.” Read more

The Guardian, Google, and the Open Knowledge Foundation have launched a new competition to find the best open government data visualization. The announcement states: “Governments around the world are releasing a tidal wave of open data – on everything from spending through to crime and health. Now you can compare national, regional and city-wide data from hundreds of locations around the world. But how good is this data? We want to see what you can do with it. What apps and visualisations can you make with this data? We want to see how the data changes the way you see the world. In conjunction with Google and the Open Knowledge Foundation (who will be helping us judge the results), see if you can win the $2,000 prize.” Read more

Julia Wetherfell of Tech President reports, “Last summer, the Japanese government announced a new open data strategy, with the intention of connecting the country’s governmental, industrial, and academic sectors. Now Japan is set to have a record year for open data projects, with open government advocates leading the way. Global Voices reported yesterday on a cluster of civic hacking events occurring this winter. An Open Data Day was held in Yokohama last weekend, where participating developers worked to make public services and cultural resources more accessible to citizens and visitors to the city. Japan’s branch of the Open Knowledge Foundation, founded last summer, is partnering with Hack for Japan, established following the 2011 earthquake, to run events in Tokyo and elsewhere for International Open Data Day on February 23.” Read more

Marc Joffe of the OKF reports, “Throughout the Eurozone, credit rating agencies have been under attack for their lack of transparency and for their pro-cyclical sovereign rating actions. In the humble belief that the crowd can outperform the credit rating oracles, we are introducing an open database of historical sovereign risk data. It is available at http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/sovdef/ where community members can both view and edit the data. Once the quality of this data is sufficient, the data set can be used to create unbiased, transparent models of sovereign credit risk. The database contains central government revenue, expenditure, public debt and interest costs from the 19th century through 2011 – along with crisis indicators taken from Reinhart and Rogoff’s public database.” Read more

Bob Brewin of NextGov.com reports, “The Veterans Health Administration plans to test how advanced clinical reasoning and prediction systems can use massive amounts of archived patient data to help improve care, efficiency and health outcomes. The Veterans Affairs Department’s electronic health record system — the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VistA — stores data on 30 million veterans, including 3.2 billion clinical orders, 1.8 billion medication prescriptions and 2.3 billion vital sign measurements. This structured data is accompanied by 2 billion clinical text notes, with a growth rate of one hundred thousand additional notes per day.” Read more