This headline above – from a Commerce Department apps challenge hosted on Challenge.gov – attracted my attention. So I decided to take the challenge to develop apps using the 2010 Census Summary File 1 and the American Community Survey (five-year data). Keep reading →
Governor Bob McDonnell signs new legislation to attract data centers to Virginia, accompanied by NVTC President Bobbie Kilberg (seated at right) and representatives from member firms.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell gets technology. He also gets the importance data centers and technology firms will play in the future of the commonwealth’s economy. Keep reading →
The federal digital strategy released today is the next step in President Barack Obama’s effort to streamline and improve government services through mobile and web-based technologies and solidifies many efforts already under way.
Analysts mostly applauded the strategy, saying it provides specific, measurable goals, demonstrates a commitment to transforming the use of technology to better serve citizens, requires the use of analytics to enable more responsive government and builds security into to the federal digital architecture. Keep reading →
During the recent Big Health Data Palooza Tweet Up, Todd Park, the nation’s new Federal chief technology officer, tweeted: “Librarians becoming the new data liberators – check out what the NLM is doing.”
So I did, to see if I could readily use their data that the National Library of Medicine makes available.
What I found though is a problem that continues to plague many agency sites and their offerings of data to the public, namely, an collection of Application Programming Interface (APIs) that make it harder than it should be to get to their data.
Specifically, what I first found on NLM’s site was a table with three columns by 21 rows linking me to lots of technical information for developers to get the data. I was expecting a Web interface to the actual data. While the API provides direct, high-level access to data contained in databases, the user still has to do some programming to do thinks such as combine multiple data sources into new applications known as mashups.
I did just that, by creating a dashboard the shows the work required to mashup the RxNorm and RxTerms APIs, for instance, and the documentation and actual data, so that a non-developer, like our readers, might use this information more readily.
Betsy Humphrey, Deputy Director of NLM, recently hosted a “Showcase of NLM APIs” to provide a high-level introduction to eight of NLM’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), where she said:
“Todd Park, our current Federal CTO, has been known to say that the NLM was into open data before it was cool and we are proud of the fact that for more than four decades we have actually been making information that we collect, organize, and curate available for use by system developers to develop additional value added products that extend the usability and value of what we do here at NLM. We encorage you to make use of these APIs and create innovative and wonderful products from them and we hope to hear from many of you that attempt to use them.”
But as described in the “Showcase of NLM APIs”: APIs are fairly old utilities with a very simple interface where you simply post a URL to our services and get back a response. NLM has about 600 million records, gets about 60 million requests per day for about 0.5 Terabytes of data per day. This is a “big data” operation, but for mostly programmers.
So after considerable effort, I concluded that NLM has interesting data, but it needs more work to package it for broader consumption by non-programmers.
As I reported previously, NLM’s Semantic Medline, which does not use an API, but delivers the actual data and visualizations of it, is considered their “killer app”, but is not well-known yet. I have had a great experience with it so far and work in progress will hopefully make it more well-known. Keep reading →
The federal office charged with promoting the sharing of security credentials for government cloud computing systems, known as FedRAMP, has released the first list of accredited Third Party Assessment Organizations (3PAO) approved for testing security controls.
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Keep reading →
Who’s that looking over your shoulder? If you’re a federal employee working on classified information on your computer, you just might have a problem.
Fully 82 percent of government workers are unprotected from computer monitor Peeping Toms, according to a recent study. Keep reading →
Only 6% of civilian agencies and 3% Defense and Intelligence agencies currently have the infrastructure and processes in place to take full advantage of big data sets and most federal organizations will need at least three years before they can, according to a just-released survey of federal IT professionals.
The survey’s findings seem to indicate a rocky road ahead for President Obama’s “Big Data Research and Development Initiative” announced in late March. As part of that initiative, six federal departments and agencies announced more than $200 million in new big data projects. Keep reading →
Barbara Fast was among those on a CGI mobile securty panel at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. on February 16, 2012.
COMMENTARY: Cybersecurity in the mobile age is everyone’s responsibility, requiring strong partnership among businesses, governments and citizens. We are living in an information age that has changed the way we conduct business and share information. Keep reading →
Lately, the most common question I get when doing briefings and presentations about the growing threat of cyber attacks is: What is the answer?
I have been giving that a fair amount of thought and have solicited input from others who are active in the field and have a good understanding of the current state of this threat. So I am going to try and address this question for the first time publicly. Keep reading →
Given the hype around cloud computing, you could be forgiven for thinking that everyone in the government contracting market agrees on what, exactly, it is. They don’t. Keep reading →