Recently I had the privilege of listening to Mr. Dave Patterson, executive director, National Defense Business Institute (NDIA), lead an open forum Oct. 5 on how the national debt crisis impacts the Department of Defense and the defense industrial base.
The forum addressed the recognized and unintentional impacts of the debt debate and the critical consequences for DoD budgets and also examined the industry health index. Keep reading →
When I saw this interactive budget image (the treemap above) issued by the White House, I thought it could actually be made clearer and really interactive with visualization tools like one I use (Spotfire) with just a little effort.
I also thought that all the data files provided by the White House for the fiscal year 2012 Budget could also be made clearer and more accessible in a spreadsheet so I decide to provide that service for our readers. Keep reading →
Last week I attended the EarthCube Charrette with about 140 geoscientists from the National Science Foundation (NSF), US Geological Survey, academic institutions, and industry. Estimates are there are about 100,000 geoscientists in the world.
The goal of EarthCube is to transform the conduct of research by supporting the development of community-guided cyberinfrastructure to integrate data and information for knowledge management across the geosciences. Keep reading →
US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson (pictured above) announced the Apps for the Environment Challenge on June 9–and almost five months to the day, the winners were announced at a forum at the Artisphere in Arlington, Va. The winner of the best overall app was the Light Bulb Finder developed by Andrea Nyland of the Eco Hatchery which helps consumers select and buy-online light bulbs that are more energy efficient while still providing the desired brightness.
Master of ceremonies Chris Dorobek welcomed a capacity crowd to the Artisphere and said that in a time when many are very dissatisfied with government, this event showed why we should like government. Keep reading →
The National Information Exchange Model, with its XML Schema for Information Exchange Package Description messages that took root three years ago, has become a bona fide c
With about 500 in-person attendees and about 200 remote attendees, this
While the NIEM
In addition, I understand why EPA, my former employer, was reluctant to endorse NIEM, because it had already done this type of activity in building its National Environmental Information Exchange Network.
Department of Homeland Security CIO Richard Spires recently praised the NIEM c
“NIEM is now the DHS enterprise architecture standard for how we interconnect systems” and that he has not seen a better return on investment for our taxpayer dollars than in supporting NIEM.
However, I found the
It would include the following elements:
I am advocating that NIEM take the next steps of moving its clearinghouse to the cloud and implementing dynamic case management to better connect the dots than it does presently and showing that with four different kinds of their content in an interoperability interface (which happens to be a Spotfire dashboard).
Putting NIEM in the cloud is much more than just where you put it (e.g. AWS Gov Cloud), but how you put it there. They should put their clearinghouse and everything else they want people to know and use in a format and interface so that users can connect the dots between their different sources of information and keep it updated with dynamic case management.
More specifically, in order to connect the dots with both messages and data, the
Dynamic Case Managment would: support the process to get the messages to the clearinghouse, enhance the functionality of the clearinghouse, build a fusion center, and support the data fusion process for “turning information into knowledge.”
Be Informed has done this for the Dutch Immigration Service and recently won an International Architecture Award and Gartner and Forrester recognitions for it.
A few years ago when I led the Federal Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) I was asked to create a demo of a searchable semantic knowledgebase of NIEM IEPD messages which I did. Now I can take that one significant step further with a new tool (Be Informed) that can use a semantic knowledgebase to make a dynamic case management system.
Last week’s news that the Department of Veterans Affairs was expanding its efforts to promote its Blue Button personal health record system prompted me to research the Blue Button program for Personal Health Records (PHR) and make them easier to use by our readers not just our Veterans.
President Obama highlighted the Blue Button Initiative, as have many others in recent weeks. The program is just one of a series of successful government challenges to promote innovation in government.
This is similar to my efforts to make Traumatic Brain Injury information more accessible and useful in another story.
An authoritative online resource: Managing Your Health Information Online explains the difference between: Electronic Health Records (EHRs) (much in the news) and Personal Health Records (PHR) as follows:
The previously mentioned authoritative online resource: Managing Your Health Information Online answers:
My comment is: why not do it yourself for free, without the Internet (especially if you are not always connected or not able to use the Internet), and in a familiar environment like a spreadsheet, notepad, or word processing document.
So I am providing the “Blue Button PHR for All Americans” as an Excel spreadsheet (XLS) and Comma Separated Value (CSV) files that can be imported into most other softwares for the convenience of our readers and their family members and friends that need them but cannot afford a commercial service or use Internet services.
On August 2, 2010, President Obama announced the Blue Button capability that allows veterans and Medicare beneficiaries to download their personal health information by a simple click of a blue button.
So now you can just download the files, read the background information and do it yourself for free and with your own security. It can be on your iPhone, iPad, and/or laptop and desktop PC or Mac. Keep reading →
The MITRE Corporation, in partnership with the Federal Service-Oriented Architecture Community of Practice (SOA CoP), recently hosted the SOA for e-Government Conference: Practical Models Across the Federal Government.
The event drew more than 250 practitioners from industry and government to discuss examples of how government is effectively adopting SOA technologies to enhance flexibility, share data and operational capabilities, and reduce costs.
The day-long conference, held on October 11 at MITRE‘s McLean, Va., campus, was the 12th in an ongoing series launched by MITRE and the Federal SOA CoP in 2006. Co-sponsored by both, the conferences aim to enable government and associated organizations achieve the benefits of SOA through collaboration, demonstration, and community efforts. Keep reading →
Someone suggested I review the new IBM Center for The Business of Government report on Use of Dashboards in Government by Sukumar Ganapati, Florida International University, pointing out one irony off the bat: There aren’t a lot of examples of dashboard illustrations in this report. So I first decided to create a dashboard of this PDF report in my social knowledgebase and use it to analyze the report, and reference all of my dashboard work relating to most of the examples in this report.
The report lists the following 11 dashboards (with links to my 7 recreated dashboards added): Keep reading →
I had the opportunity to attend the Amazon Web Services Gov Cloud Summit II on Oct. 18 in Washington, DC, which featured the new Amazon Federal and Gov Cloud (US) offering for architects, solution developers, and executives. The summit also featured senior federal agency IT executives talking about their use of those services. Keep reading →
Census Director Robert Groves blogged recently about the consequences of budget cuts and “determined that Census needed to terminate a number of existing programs such as the Current Industrial Reports program, the Statistical Abstract, and our foreign demographic analysis program to mention a few, in order to fund higher priority programs.”
So recently the Census Bureau announced it is “terminating the collection of data for the Statistical Compendia program effective October 1, 2011. The Statistical Compendium program is comprised of the Statistical Abstract of the United States and its supplemental products — the State and Metropolitan Area Data Book and the County and City Data Book.” Keep reading →