David Needle
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

David Needle Blog

From the “sometimes you have to swing for the fences” department.

A co-founder of enterprise search firm Vivisimo has sent a letter to President Obama urging him to use online tools to make a better connection with the electorate. The letter was sent via an online form at the Whitehouse.Gov site designed to give common folk a chance to connect with President Obama.

A recent N.Y. Times article highlighted the arduous task White House staffers are charged with, picking from among the tens of thousands of letters (e-mail, fax, paper) that come in each day and picking a mere ten each day for President Obama to review.

That got Jerome Pesenti, chief scientist and co-founder of Vivisimo, thinking. He told me he has no idea if his letter will even get read (underscoring the issue he’s trying to address) but figured it was worth a shot.

The idea is fairly simple,” says Pesenti. “The President has a topic in mind or wants to get an idea of what people are talking about, what issues are important to them, whether it’s social security, the budget and so on. It’s such an obvious thing to be able to do.”

What’s obvious to Pesenti is that enterprise search tools, whether from Vivisimo or a competitor, can quickly identify correspondence by subject matter or most any other criteria, making it far easier to make a comprehensive selection than the more random process it is now. And Obama himself could to it. Pesenti said he’d gladly offer the software to the White House for free.

Complete story

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