Interesting reading ...

"Government data is being put online to increase accountability, contribute valuable information about the world, and to enable government, the country, and the world to function more efficiently. All of these purposes are served by putting the information on the Web as Linked Data. Start with the "low-hanging fruit". Whatever else, the raw data should be made available as soon as possible. Preferably, it should be put up as Linked Data. As a third priority, it should be linked to other sources. As a lower priority, nice user interfaces should be made to it -- if interested communities outside government have not already done it. The Linked Data technology, unlike any other technology, allows any data communication to be composed of many mixed vocabularies. Each vocabulary is from a community, be it international, national, state or local; or specific to an industry sector. This optimizes the usual trade-off between the expense and difficulty of getting wide agreement, and the practicality of working in a smaller community. Effort toward interoperability can be spent where most needed, making the evolution with time smoother and more productive."

Interesting hearing ...

E-Government 2.0:
Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access
Statement of Chairman Joseph Lieberman
December 11, 2007

Good morning and welcome to our hearing today. Five years ago this month, the president signed into law the E-Government Act of 2002 - a bill I was privileged to cosponsor with Senators Conrad Burns and Fred Thompson - to bring the federal government into the Internet Age and better serve the public. The goal of the bill, as I said at the time, was to “exchange what is… cumbersome, static, and often bewildering for a dynamic, interactive, and user-friendly government.”
Today we will ask how close the government has come to reaching that goal. Is it responding and adapting to user habits and new technologies to increase public participation, promote interagency cooperation, and make itself more transparent and accountable? While I think we have made much progress, I think our witness would agree that there’s more the government as a whole could and should be doing ..... (more)

Possible model for One Long Island's "Citizen Media Network"

"CITIZEN MEDIA is a collaborative research project which unites leading creative and technology experts from across Europe on research, development and validation of A/V systems to enable multiple non-professional users to co-create networked applications and experiences based on their own user-generated content. In this project new ways are investigated on how to exploit the huge amount of user-generated content in innovative ways to support people in their daily lives and how technology will enable social change to strongly involve users for co-creating networked applications. This work will introduce new concepts that may modify the role of stakeholders in the classical value chain for content delivery.To this end, applications, services, systems, infrastructure, technology and architectures are developed based on a user-centric approach. The goal is to enable any user at any location with any device to consume, author and publish his own content towards a networked A/V system.
Based on user-generated media recorded by different users at different times, an open and flexible architecture will be proposed that creates a novel networked application or experience each time a user uploads new content. The underlying infrastructure hides the complexity of content handling for the end user by supporting trans-coding of formats, customization and mixing of personal and private content. To facilitate co-creation by multiple non-professional users based on their own user-generated content, the A/V system has to be able to handle a massive amount of user-generated content in different formats in real time, annotate and store this content in huge databases, search, retrieve, process and render all these pieces of user-generated content to create a new experience. Combined with new technology for collaborative communication and easy and multimodal user interfaces, this will lead to appealing new applications. To build successful applications that assure strong user involvement to co-create the application by uploading their user-generated content, user-centric design methods are used. End-to-end service delivery, network and operational scalability are considered over converged broadcast and IP communication networks, over mobile and fixed access networks to heterogeneous terminals in and outside the home."

"Viral" Information Systems: Part One

I think most folks have heard of "viral" marketing by now.

So what if we use some of those techniques to enhance information flow on Long Island (and elsewhere)? What is the best method to do so?

We've posted previously about the attributes of the flexibility and cost effectiveness and of an XML based system. We've also posted previously about how, with the advent of new Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies Long Islanders (and others) can create an environment whereby they are active participants in the information flow (New York State Alert System, Citizen Media Network and Citizen Alert Network etc.).

We've also seen recently the use of text messaging (SMS) to alert student of possible dangers on their campuses.

The above graphic (click on the graphic for a larger view) illustrates how an XML based system (in all its variants and bridge attributes) can be used to create a "viral" information system where information can be distributed to many from single or multiple points of origin.

More in part two.