Recovery.gov: $84,000,000's of Nonsense, 476 Bright Ideas, and One Possible Boost for the Semantic Web
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 4 2009
You might have been popping around the web lately and run into references that the Recovery.gov website we see before us today cost taxpayers $84 million. If so, you've no doubt thought to yourself, "Um, that's insane." Yes, of course it is. It's complete nonsense. Recovery.gov didn't cost $84 million. You'd have to be using gold-plated pixels, favicons made of diamonds, and a server farm built entirely out of saffron to ring up a bill like that already on a site that doesn't accomplish all that much of yet. Now, that $84 million figure isn't out of thin air. But it's the total 2009-2011 operating budget for the operation of Earl Devaney's Recovery Act and Transparency Board, and its staff of "30 IT experts, auditors, investigators and aides," according to the Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe.
In the hopes of using that money wisely, Devaney and the National Academy of Public Administration have just wrapped up a week of online discussion over the nuts and bolts of how to run Recovery.gov. Devaney and NAPA had been hoping for a "vendor-neutral" experience. They didn't get it. Many of the top ideas were for specific technologies, like data warehousing solutions and mapping programs, though ones that might be helpful in creating the best possible oversight site.
NAPA reports that the week-long dialogue drew in just under 470 ideas and just over 2,600 users, and attracted about 3.7 million hits.
One of the ideas that drew the most ratings and comments was one from participant "timbl" proposing a system of "linked open data." The idea is to construct Recovery.gov data with an eye to how it can interact with the rest of the web: "People will be connecting this data with scientific data, community data, social web data, enterprise data, and government data from other agencies and organization, and other countries, to ask all kinds of interesting questions not asked before. This data must be put up with an awareness that it is one among many data sources with which it will later be linked together."
If that sounds a lot like the idea of the semantic web that's been bouncing around the web world for years now, that's because "timbl" is Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the semantic web's lead evangelist. The RAT Board's adoption of a linked-data model could just provide the push that the semantic web needs to get off the ground once and for all. "The recovery data is a great opportunity," writes Berners-Lee, "to set an example for future government data." From there, the world.