Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Independence Day is coming up quickly – and it looks like we’ll be celebrating freedom of government data, too.

This week the IT Dashboard — which lets the general public explore federal IT investments and their progress over time — went live. The IT Dashboard displays data received from agency reports to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), including general information on more than 7,000 federal IT investments and detailed data for nearly 800 of those investments that agencies classify as “major.” For now, agency CIOs submit data through data screens in an application interface, though it’s expected that XML data feeds will be added soon.

That should be interesting news to semantic web leaders, who are urging greater transparency into government data to enhance accountability and efficiencies. Tim Berners Lee, for instance, recently posted a lengthy note on the topic of putting U.K. and U.S. government data online. Not surprisingly, he urges government parties to put the raw data up as soon as possible as open linked data so that it can be accessible through any number of applications, and easily mashed up with other piece of linked data. In his note he offers recommendations to government agencies about how to get there, from converting XML files, spreadsheet formats such as CSV, and even relational databases into RDF.

It seems like the calls for freeing government data are multiplying. Even as the current administration has racked up some positive press over the new IT Dashboard, Sunlight Foundation has called the efforts of the Recovery.gov web site dramatically reduced because they fail to include raw data related to the spending of Recovery Act funds.

Writes Ellen Miller, the co-founder and executive director of Sunlight Foundation, which is a non-partisan non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency, “Sunlight has argued strongly for raw data in machine readable formats as the starting point for Recovery.gov. This is a significant failure by the Administration to live up to its promise for full and complete disclosure. Significant failure.”

The Foundation this week launched Transparency Corps as a way for citizens to get involved in making government transparency a reality. Its goal is to help improve citizens’, bloggers’ and journalists’ access to existing information, digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable everyone to collaborate in fostering greater transparency.

The first task on its list: Asking those who join to upload a photo of themselves asking Congress to pass H. Res. 554, which mandates that legislation be posted online for at least 72 hours before it is considered so that the public can participate in its review.

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