On Government Data: Data Catalogs. Transparency Initiatives. What’s next?

In a recent interview with Fast Company, Lisa Strausfeld who is a partner at Pentagram said “If we could be as obsessive with government data as we are with baseball stats, maybe it would change the form of democracy”. This says it all about the power of government data.

A vast number of government datasets are already available on the Web at various government data catalogs. A number of Government Transparency Initiatives like Global Integrity and Sunlight Foundation, Apps for Democracy, etc. are leading the charge in making these datasets accessible to citizens / internet users.

For instance, Sunlight Foundation’s is helping citizens become better informed and more involved in public discourses by making “select” government datasets accessible to the public through its millions of dollars in grants. Sunlight Foundation has created over a dozen of websites such as OpenCongress.org, FedSpending.org, OpenSecrets.org, EarmarkWatch.org, and LOUISdb.org. Some of these project are hugely successful. For instance, FedSpending.org had logged over 10 milions searches within a year of launch. This statistic should settle the argument on the value and whether anyone cares about government data. However, with many thousands of govenrment datasets coming out, a new approach is needed to suppliment current efforts of “enabling select datasets through grants”.

Semantifi offers a new approach using a new kind of technology to make vast number of databsets searchable via its OPEN & FREE data search platform. At Semantifi, anyone can configure any datasets (government or others) to its search engine and publish them as “Data Search Apps”. Apps can be shared publicly or within groups allowing citizens / users to search these datasets by asking simple questions like “Top 5 Senators requesting Earmarks in 2008″, “Federal Spending in New York versus Illinois”, etc.

While Semantifi can make datasets searchable with its data search platform, it’s the citizen publishers that can really catalyze government transparency movement and revolutionize democracy by making “vast numbers of government datasets searchable”.