Semantic Web + Access to Govt = Change
March 01 2008 / by Alvis Brigis / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Government Year: 2008 Rating: 11
It’s no secret that we have a problem. The American political system is a bit secretive, quite inefficient and wastes a good amount of our resources. Such is the nature of gigantic bureaucracies.
Like any problem, to solve it we must first quantify or count it. With large groups of people involved, any such quantification must be very accurate and very easy to understand at a glance.
This notion is nearly synonymous with a concept that David
Stephenson refers to as transparent government, or 
“using Web 2.0 apps … to allow informed debate on policy
alternatives, to find convergences (possible synergies—and wasteful
overlaps), and to allow people with particular interests and/or
expertise to contribute to issues.”
Thanks to the evolution of the web and internet applications, we’ll soon take a big leap in our ability to simulate super-complex political systems (especially if they are computer-dependent). Two fundamental, yet eminently do-able, steps remain to be taken:
1) make the majority of government information machine-readable
2) put emerging semantic web applications to work crunching this data
Change will swiftly follow if we can accurately and neatly organize political relationship trees, decision patterns and funding flows into a digestible “graph” that anyone can easily re-sort and view a million different ways from a billion different directions.
