NASA’s deputy CIO Deborah Diaz doesn’t just talk about data center consolidation. She’s rolling up her sleeves and making it happen at the space agency.
Since Diaz joined NASA in 2009, she’s been responsible for shrinking the number of data centers from 79 to 54 and eventually to 22, driven by the Obama administration’s effort to eliminate excessive and duplicative services. Keep reading →
The purpose of the USDebtClock.org is to inform the public of the dire financial condition of the United States of America–and it does it a pretty good job. The origin and history of the National Debt Clock from physical billboard to online is told in Wikipedia.
The US Government has recently featured several spending dashboards (Recovery.gov, IT Spending.gov, etc.) and most recently the Federal Procurement Data System – Next Generation. Keep reading →
Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website that provides easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse. My AOL colleague, Richard Walker wrote recently about how Recovery.gov “Shows The Power Of Transparency In Tracking Federal Spending” since the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board [RAT Board] has provided “a commendable model of transparency… the tremendous success of the RAT Board is worthy of replication throughout the federal bureaucracy.”
He also mentions how the proposed Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2011 (DATA Act) would establish consistent data elements and standards for federal financial information to assure comparability and reliability in reported information and how recipient reporting through federalreporting.gov is the most cutting-edge feature of the transparency process and should be an integral part of federal spending accountability. Keep reading →
Last week’s 5.8 magnitude earthquake along the east coast and the subsequent battering by Hurricane Irene unleashed not only a heavy dose of nature’s fury, but also a torrent of social media messaging.
And perhaps more than ever before, the federal government played a prominent role in the dialogue. While figures for this past week’s activity are still being gathered, a snapshot of social media use by federal agencies in mid-August, assembled by Breaking Gov, shows its no longer just the White House that is gaining a growing social media following. Keep reading →
The Bush Administration had its Results.Gov scorecard. The Obama Administration now has unveiled its Performance.Gov dashboard.
Is a dashboard better than a scorecard? Keep reading →
I was recently asked to present my Linked Open Data work to the Data.gov Semantic Web and Linked Open Data Team.
One of the examples I presented was work being done by The New York Times and its efforts to catalog headings and topics. It represents a best practice example of what government agencies could and should do and I wanted to share that with our readers to help you understand the value of doing this with high-quality data sets.
For the last 150 years, The New York Times has maintained one of the most authoritative news vocabularies ever developed. In 2009, they began to publish this vocabulary using a methodology known as linked open data (illustrated above). The New York Times also uses approximately 30,000 tags to power their Times Topics Pages.
It is their intention to publish all of these tags as linked open data. Linked open data enables all of us to use the NY Times data and other data. In the illustration above, each circle represents a source of linked data and the other sources of data it is linked (related) to.
I have published both NY Times data sets as linked open data in Spotfire, a software tool that captures data in convenient ways, so readers can more readily browse, search, and download these invaluable data sets! This Spotfire chart is published to the cloud as are the documentation of this story in the MindTouch Technical Communication Suite.
See the live version.Government workers and their contractors are intensely interested in everything that is being said about Gov 20 now and would like a place where they could get a distillation and visualization of that. Well today we can show you one solution that provides some interesting insights!
Chris Holden, Community Manager for
I have talked about Recorded Future in several of my data stories published on Breaking Gov and how they mine more than 25,000 Internet sources and are backed by the CIA and Google.
Chris Holden, Community Manager for Recorded Future, and I met recently to talk about how we could mine and visualize people’s quotes about the debt ceiling debate so much in the news and on people’s minds right now. The initial result is shown above. Keep reading →
Last week, President Barack Obama kicked off his first Twitter town hall with – what else? – a tweet.
And then he sent another tweet to get the conversation really going: “Today 2:07 PM Obama says: in order to reduce the deficit, what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep – both.”
Before it ended about an hour later, a number of well-known tweeters (e.g. House Speaker John Boehner) and lots of lesser known folks had tweeted hoping to catch the President’s attention and get a personal response to their question or comment.
While lots of commentary has already and will be written about this historic event, I thought I could provide something different (wearing my data scientist/data journalist hat) and parse his tweets, and those of previous town halls, if I could just recover the tweet steam. I used Searchtastic to retrieved 346 Tweets for visualization. Keep reading →