Posts Tagged ‘linked data’
Opportunity: Spending of government money should have a purpose and that purpose should be for the benefit of someone whether directly or indirectly. The benefit might for an employee to work better and that employee might be working to benefit a group of citizens. The administration wishes to create a more transparent, effective and innovative government as well as to reduce the federal deficit. In order to do this, the administration must identify opportunities for innovation which can increase efficiency as well as decrease spending and make the case to the American people that it is making more effective use of taxpayer funds. I want to make the case here that linking spending data to benefits of that spending in ways which are detailed, clear and relevant to large numbers of citizens is the best way to find innovations to create a more effective government as well as to make transparency have meaning and value for the average citizen.
Challenge:
- Linking Spending to Benefits: Federal spending is reported in ways which do not clearly connect it to the benefits that specific expenditures provide. While certain dollar amounts may be reported as going toward ‘Defense’ that is not specific enough to understand whether a given expenditure is justifiable and doesn’t allow an expenditure of group expenditures to be compared to alternative solutions for the same specific benefit oriented goal. Therefore we must find ways to better connect specific spending to specific benefits.
- Benefits of expenditures must clear and relevant: Benefits must be stated in ways which are relevant and understandable for a large number of citizens. For example, a system which tracks resources in a government program is not relevant until it is connected to the benefits that program provides and to whom it provides those benefits. Often times expenditures are reported as supportting a program, system or equipment but not clearly connected to an intermediary benefit it attempts to provide a person or to the outcome of the the program or equipment and its end beneficiaries. What is relevant to the average citizen is not how systems support systems or programs support programs but how overall efforts affect people, in what way it affects those people, who those people are, and what is the cost of providing that benefit. For instance in the case of a self-help kiosk at a federal office. The relevant benefit is not how it supports the agency’s program but how many citizens does it serve, how frequently does it serve them, how well does it serve them and at what cost per citizen?
- Providing Spending to Benefit visibiliy to a large audience will spur innovation. Making the links between spending and outcome visible to a large audience is a critical step in identifying opportunities for innovation in government to increase government’s effectiveness. Innovation comes from diverse people considering things in different ways (remember KIDFAD from Wisdom of the Crowds), so making connections between spending and benefits broadly relevant and visible will provide the greatest opportunity for innovation in creating more effective means to achieve similar benefits. Also innovation comes from novel approaches to address overal goals so providing information on overall cost to an end benefit served to people provides the greatest opportunity to innovate other ways to provide the benefit. If, for instance, you simply focused on the cost of gas for a truck to travel 1000 miles, rather than the benefit of transporting chairs on that truck, you might miss the opportunity to send it by train. Of course if you focused on the goal of having chairs at a location, you might notice that it might be cheaper to purchase them at the end destination rather than pack them up and transport them back and forth.
- Meaningful Transparency. Making the connection between benefits and spending in ways which the average citizen can understand and find relevant is required in order to achieve government transparency in a way in which transparency will have meaning for the average citizen.
Approach: Identify, Find and Link Disparate Data Sources which can clarify the benefits of Government Expenditures
Datsets must be found which can connect government spending to both outcomes and benefits to people. For instance, compete.com provides data on how many visitors a website receives. Connecting the cost of a government website to the number of visitors it receives per year can give a cost per citizen served. Therefore getting the free data provided by Compete.com and linking it to the cost of a government website will provide more transparency and a clearly cost of the benefit provided. This can then be compared to other ways of providing that same benefit of information delivery.
Another example is connecting the expense of providing office furniture to a known number of employees in an agency can then make it clear, the cost of doing providing office support per employee which could be compared to private sector data.
Connecting government expenditures to their benefits and making clear the cost per beneciary in relevant ways can become a starting point for encouraging innovation to make a more effective government as well as to give the idea of government transparency meaning and value to largest number of people.
Case for Using the Resource Description Framework Or Linked Data Model:
While linking data can be done in many different ways, I do want to give a plug for the linked data model in this instance, because in the long term, I believe it is the best way to connect government spending with the benefits of that spending.
Of course connecting spending to benefits is not always as simple as the examples I gave, nor is the data easy to find and easy to connect. In fact you may need to link multiple datasets in a chain to get the benefit information in a way which is relevant and broadly understandable. The resource description framework or Linked Data model gives us a way to start to collect this kind of data in a distributed fashion without strict central control and does not even require it to be on the same server or system in order to be linkable. This makes RDF or Linked Data an ideal candidate to complete the long term vision of linking complex federal spending data with its outcome and benefits in a way which can have meaning for the average American Citizen.
A Step toward Data Interoperability? Linked Data, Databases and avoiding the security headache.
Posted on: May 26, 2009
Tim Berners-Lee concept of linked data clearly is a way to make data more usable whether this is public data or data within a large enterprise. Linked data promises a future which makes related data more interoperable, discoverable and opens the door for innovation.
But how do we take large existing data stores and apply linked data principles to achieve these benefits? We currently have massive existing data stores with complex security regimes which are depended upon for many legacy applications. To make them available as Linked Data is a huge challenge especially if we were to recreate these data stores in XML syntax using RDF/RDFa or even simpler XML schemas. This is coupled with the fact that many of benefits of the reconstituted data have not yet been invented so an ROI argument cannot clearly be made. Of course, they haven’t been invented yet because while many can agree the data would be more usable, those uses must be discovered by fiddling with the data in linked form and discovering the uses that emerge. Since the linked form, doesn’t yet exist, we have the classic chicken in the egg problem.
Perhaps there is a step we can take toward linked data without making large changes to the existing data stores in government and industry. Let’s review the principles of Linked Data first (as paraphrased from wikipedia to add clarity):
- Use URIs (Unique Resource Identifiers) to identify things that you expose to the Web as resources.
- Use HTTP URIs so that people can locate and look up (dereference) these things.
- Provide useful information about the resource when its URI is dereferenced.
- Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data as a means of improving information discovery on the Web.
The striking thing about these principles is that they don’t mention XML or RDFa etc but focus instead on linking data to definitions. So it would seem a hybrid solution between the linked data concept and existing databases is possible. We could add URIs as fields in existing databases for important elements and define a central location where we will track information about that element. For instance, in the US government there are lots of federal buildings used by multiple agencies. So I would assume many agencies have databases which refer to federal buildings. Why not establish a central location to define those buildings and assign each a URI. (A URI by the way is essentially a universal identifier for a real world object. Essentially it is a web page for each building, but the page would more like contain data links than nice pictures. (Oh and some people refer to URIs as URNs or Unique Resource Name in an effort to make them more human readable which is nice too) .
So each federal building would have a URI/URN and we could of course put more information about each building in a centrally defined schema, but that will start to be real work and have instant security issues. So why not initially just have URIs contain recipricol links to databases which also contain that identifier? The links would have brief non-security breaking descriptions of what type of data is stored in the database which is linked to. This would remove the need to re-securitize a lot of information to make it cross-department/cross-agency available. And here is the other key to success for this type of solution: Don’t require the back links to the databases to expose data unless they already do so. If we start requiring data to be exposed in this step, it opens up the security pandora’s box. We need to avoid imposing a new security regime for centralized data, because it is a stumbling block which would create delays and costs. And if people do not clearly see the benefits of this step, then it would simply die in committee in most cases.
So that is fine you say. We have URIs for important data elements and for databases which contain those elements but it is not exposing data, so where is the benefit? I think this stripped down version of linked data would have 4 definite benefits:
- Reference. The URIs could serve as reference documents to find where similar information is stored. Users could then apply for security permissions on an as needed basis when they need to link to other databases.
- Innovation. Users, who would now have a more complete map of available data could be begin to suggest more uses for linking the data.
- Discoverability. Search engines (internal or external depending on the security decided upon for the URNs) could make existing databases more discoverable because the engines could discover important data elements in the databases. Search engines make use of links to discoverable relevance to searches and are often key to researching problems .
- Interoperability. The process of assigning URIs will begin to expose problems in data interoperability due to different definitions in different databases. The URI map would serve as a survey of issues in creating truly interoperable data.
So now the readers of this blog are in at least 2 camps.
- Those who feel this is a half measure and would be a distraction from advocating for more completely linked data.
- Those who are still not clear on the benefits of bothering to start the process of linking data at all.
I am hoping there is a third camp which sees this as a doable step in large enterprises such as the US government. And that it would be the first step toward data which is more linked and therefore more usable for both public and internal uses, and eventually interoperable.
Let me know which camp you are in!
