city of washington publishing xml

[Michael Lenczner]

(sorry if someone already forwarded this)

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/28/79594_27OPstrategic_1.html

 Open government meets IT
Public data, made available electronically, can empower the citizenry
in unique ways

By Jon Udell
June 28, 2006  

One of the speakers at InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum in New York
last fall was Dan Thomas, director of the DCStat program in
Washingon's Office of the CTO. Earlier this month, he alerted me to a
remarkable development. Starting in mid-June, the District of Columbia
would begin releasing operational data from a variety of city agencies
to the Internet in several XML formats, including RSS and Atom.

"Our expectation is that it will spawn mashups, analysis, and who
knows what ripple effects," Thomas wrote. "We also expect it will
motivate government agencies to seek and sustain high levels of
performance."

On June 12 the first of the feeds — data on the disposition of service
requests received by the Mayor's Call Center and the online Service
Request Center — was quietly launched at the Center for Innovation and
Reform. I immediately grabbed the data, and in a few hours I had
cobbled together a proof-of-concept mashup that displays requests
related to street repaving and gutter repair on a map of the District
of Columbia. If you've ever visited Adrian Holovaty's award-winning
ChicagoCrime.org, you can see what this might mean for Washington.

Here's a critical difference, though. Holovaty had to devote a
considerable amount of effort to screen scraping the Chicago Police
Department's Citizen ICAM Web site in order to extract the data — and
still more effort to geocode it. I'm sure that while he was writing
that screen scraper he was mentally screaming: "Just give me the
data!"

DCStat is doing just that. The Atom and RSS feeds summarize activity,
and all the details — including latitude and longitude — are included
in DCStat's own XML format. Following the initial launch of the
service request feed, new ones will appear at roughly two-week
intervals throughout the summer and fall. These feeds will contain raw
operational data about crime, property, housing code enforcement, and
business and liquor licensing.

There are some loose ends. Although it's true that XML is a
self-describing format, there is as yet no documentation to guide
developers who want to build applications on top of the data, or
analysts who want to interpret it. And because the first monthly cycle
isn't yet complete, it's not obvious how to mesh daily, weekly, and
monthly dumps. I expect these questions will be resolved soon, though.

>From one perspective this is a great SOA success story. In an e-mail
to me describing the DCStat architecture, Dan Thomas mentioned many of
the buzzwords familiar to cognoscenti: EAI, ETL (extraction,
transformation, and loading), GIS (Geographic Information System),
ESB, XML, RSS. But these are all just means to an end. And in this
case, it's a particularly inspiring end: government services that are
open and accountable, the performance of which can be measured.

For my Friday podcast last week, I spoke with Dan Thomas and District
of Columbia CTO Suzanne Peck, one of InfoWorld's 2005 CTO 25 awardees,
about the potential impact of this open government initiative. They
told me that the key enablers were a bunch of three-letter-acronym
technologies that have recently matured, and that's true. On top of
all that complex infrastructure, however, there's a simple yet
profound idea. Government is us, and its data is our data. Reflect it
back to us, and good things will happen.