Marshall Brain's Blog

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Government Information Awareness

This is an interesting site:

http://opengov.media.mit.edu/

This is a site that is trying to gather as much information as possible on the U.S. government. Its goal is to be the "single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America." The basic idea is that citizens and government employees will be able to submit things they know, and this repository will hold it all.

Obviously a site like this will contain millions of pieces of information. The key is to keep all of that infomation organized so it is easy to navigate. To try it out, enter the site, select the legislative branch, select the senate, find Hilary Clinton, and then look at the list of donors. Click on one, and you can see everyone else that the donor gave money to. Click on the “New York” part of Hilary’s description and you see everyone else in NY. And so on. The part that is intriguing is the crosslinking of everything in “obvious” ways. The site's home page describes it this way:

Everything in its system is either an entity or a link -- a thing or a relationship. This allows the system to grow in any direction, and accommodate as-yet unimagined institutions, organizations, or threats.

It will be interesting to see what this site looks like a year from now as it really gets rolling.