What do you get when you join up machine-readable representations of federal government agencies’ strategic plans and spending on IT resources? Expressing these as Linked Data adds value in that it becomes easier to correlate and mash up information, and even to determine how or whether technology implementations are helping to achieve agencies’ big-picture goals.

At next week’s Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C., George Thomas, Change Agent at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, will discuss connecting these dots in a session entitled, Realizing the GPRMA using Government Linked Data. The Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 requires that agencies publish strategic plans, which they’re often doing as Word or PDF documents, on their websites. Meanwhile, the IT Dashboard website is the space for federal agencies to provide details of federal information technology investments. “So the idea of using Linked Data to realize GPRMA suggests we can do better in connecting or linking the strategic goals with the IT resource expenditures,” says Thomas.

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The Environmental Protection Agency is facing some tough challenges in the run-up to the presidential elections. The House wants to cut its funding by 18 percent, and it’s dealing with criticism from some corners that new regulatory proposals could impose another burden on businesses that may hurt economic recovery efforts.

Hands up if you think this makes an even stronger case for investigating the role of semantic technology and Linked Data projects in the government sector. Semantic technology doesn’t favor any political parties’ agendas, of course. But Linked Data approaches do help the government (and the citizenry) do more with and get more out of data for less money, as Bernadette Hyland, co-chair W3C Government Linked Data Working Group and CEO of 3 Round Stones, explains here.

Add to that that its application could some day have a softening impact on regulatory requirements, too. While it’s too early in the government’s exploration of Linked Data for such scenarios to have been played out yet, the idea seems to have merit. “I’m part of the EPA’s IT organization so I’m not really involved in policy work, but there’s huge potential there,” says  David G. Smith, Information Management Specialist at the U.S. EPA. Smith will be speaking at the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C. about the work the EPA has underway related to Linked Data.

Consider, for example, that modeling and publishing and mashing linked government data sets – the EPA’s but other agencies’, too – could lead to new understandings into the cumulative regulatory burden on companies.

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Podcast Link
In September’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang we are joined by Brand Niemann of the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a discussion of efforts to apply semantic technologies to Government data in the USA and elsewhere.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

apps.gov, and Vivek Kundra’s post on the White House [...]

Original Article

Executive Summary

The non-obvious ‘second use’ of Excel is that of a universal data recycling bin for Organisational ‘reports’ and ‘data dumps’. Examples exist everywhere; the main reason is that it is just so convenient to do – everyone is an Excel expert when it comes to tidying up, sorting and generally asking questions that can be answered from within any one single spreadsheet. But asking questions that can only be answered by connecting many spreadsheets together is harder to achieve technically and yet the payoff can be large.

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