Returning from Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington got me more interested in this budding Government Transparency phenomenon. At this time it is mostly a lot of buzz and very little tangible progress. Here are my two cents on what it takes to really catalyze Government Transparency:
President Obama campaigned on the vision of Government Transparency and made it a priority for his administration. Last year his CIO, Vivek Kundra, launched DATA.GOV to begin putting government datasets on the Web.
Making government datasets available on the Web as “raw datasets” is a good first step. However, raw datasets are not accessible to the millions of Citizens that they are intended for as manipulating raw datasets can be very time consuming and technically challenging. For government datasets to be truly transparent, they must be searchable on the Web.
We understand the administration’s goal to help citizens become better informed and to better engage them in public discourse. Semantifi can help with this goal by enabling citizens socialize government data & insights using its “free data search platform” at www.SEMANTIFI.com.
Unlike Google, Bing and others that search Web Pages, Semantifi searches structured data and engages the community to publish datasets to make them searchable. Users can ask simple questions to search all published datasets, get meaningful answers in the form of charts & tables and share their observations & insights.
Launched earlier this year, Semantifi.com already hosts many popular government datasets covering Government Spending, Recovery, US Economic Metrics, SEC Filings, Earmarks, Recovery, US Aid, FDIC, US Census, etc. At Semantifi.com, users can
- Explore Recovery data with questions likes “Jobs recovered in New York and California”, “Award Amount by Recipient State and Performance District”
- Discover government spending with questions like “Federal Funding to California versus New York”, “Federal funding amount for quarter 1 year 2008”
- Research over 22,000 US Economic Metrics with questions like “Unemployed and Housing Starts for last 60 months”, “Business Loans between Jan 2005 and Dec 2009”
- Investigate SEC Filings of publicly traded companies asking questions like “Sales and Income of Amazon and Best Buy”, “Net Sales of companies with Market Capital over 1 billion”
We believe Semantifi can catalyze the administration’s vision of government transparency by making vast number of government databases searchable using pioneering search technology and engaging a community of citizen publishers.
