Todd Park

Justin Kern of Information Management reports, “The U.S. government is outlining its new program for an open source repository to foster collaboration on getting more information to citizens in a faster manner. Federal CTO Todd Park formally introduced Project Open Data on Thursday in a blog post, and gave an update on its first days of activity. In the first 24 hours after Project Open Data was published, more than two dozen contributors submitted to its GitHub platform, including fixes to broken Web links and policy input. Other, meatier contributions, or ‘pull requests,’ included a tool that converts spreadsheets and databases into APIs for ease of use by developers, and code that translates geographic data from locked formats into open, available formats, according to Park.” continued…

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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.” continued…

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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. continued…

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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’.” continued…

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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.” continued…

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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.” continued…

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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.” continued…

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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.” continued…

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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.” continued…

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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.” continued…

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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.” continued…

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Jane Wakefield of the BBC reports that Glasgow has been awarded a £24 million grant by the British government to make it one of the UK’s first smart cities. She writes, “[Glasgow] will use the money on projects to demonstrate how a city of the future might work. They will include better services for Glaswegians, with real-time information about traffic and apps to check that buses and trains are on time. The council will also create an app for reporting issues such as potholes and missing bin collections. Other services promised by the council include linking up the CCTV cameras across the city with its traffic management unit in order to identify traffic incidents faster.” continued…

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The University of Leeds is conducting a survey to determine the barriers to realizing the value of open government data. According to the survey website, “The University of Leeds, Socio-technical Centre and Centre for Integrated Energy Research, are conducting a research project on realising the value of open government data. This survey plays a key role in the project and focuses on developing understanding of: the potential barriers to improving the supply of open government data; the potential barriers to increasing the use of open data; and approaches to overcoming these potential barriers. By participating in this survey and providing your viewpoint you will be helping to shape policy, research and the wider dialogue on open data.” continued…

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Marie Madden of the Galway Independent reports, “Researchers at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway are leading a multi-million euro European Union initiative aimed at government transparency and giving citizens a voice in creating policies. The project, entitled ‘Puzzled by Policy’ has now launched a new widget (http://join.puzzledbypolicy.eu) that provides a fun way for users to find out about immigration policy and become actively involved in the immigration policy-making process. This unique widget encourages users to explore their opinions on various immigration topics, as well as enabling them to see how their views compare to those of policy-makers, NGOs, and other immigration stakeholders.” continued…

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…and make it machine readable. Jason Miller of Federal News Radio reports, “White House technology leaders are close to issuing a new policy that will change the way agencies release data to the public. Todd Park, the federal chief technology officer, said Friday the new policy is one of several steps to spur the release of more data from agencies. ‘We are going to continue to enlist additional federal agencies in the open data initiatives program as fast track liberators of key existing data sets that could create large scale economics benefit while protecting privacy,’ Park said at the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology meeting in Washington. ‘We also, as per the recently announced Digital Government Strategy just this past summer, with OMB will be releasing policy soon that makes open and computer readable the default status of new data created by the government going forward’.” continued…

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