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CACM, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, November 17, 2010
- Who is the White House's most frequent visitor?
- Which White House staffer has the most visitors?
- How do smoking quit rates, state by state, relate to unemployment, taxes, and violent crimes?
- How do politics influence U.S. Supreme Court decisions?
- How many earthquakes occurred worldwide recently?
- Where and how strong were they?
- Which states have the cleanest air and water?
If you know how to look, the answers to all of these questions, and more, can be found in the treasure trove of government documents now available on
Data.gov.
In the interest of transparency, the Obama Administration has posted 272,000 or more sets of raw data from its departments, agencies, and offices to the World Wide Web. But, connecting the dots to derive meaning from the data is difficult.
Mining Data.gov
The Rensselaer team has figured out how to find relationships among the literally billions of bits of government data, pulling pieces from different places on the Web, using technology that helps the computer and software understand the data, then combine it in new and imaginative ways as "mash-ups," which mix or mash data from two or more sources and present them in easy-to-use, visual forms.
By combining data from different sources, data mash-ups identify new, sometimes unexpected relationships. The approach makes it possible to put all that information buried on the Web to use and to answer myriad questions, such as answers to the questions asked above.
Read more.