ThisWeKnow
- App URL
- http://www.ThisWeKnow.org/
- Source URL
- http://github.com/btucker/thisweknow
- Description
Our mission is to present the information the government has in its possession — to show what the government knows about every community. Publishing its data in one large, integrated application, the government empowers its citizens to react to, and act on, what's known.
In this first phase of development, we focused on a handful of nationwide datasets from each of six different agencies in the data.gov catalog. We picked databases that each had a spatial component. We converted these into RDF and loaded them into a semantic database. An advantage of storing the data.gov information using RDF is that the database and applications can readily expand as new data sources are added to the catalog, without requiring new coding or revisions to existing coding. In a relational database, the connections between information will need to be made in advance, schema revisions will be necessary as new databases are loaded.
To manage the complexity of presenting so much information, we developed the 'factoid' approach, where queries are presented as simple sentences about a town. While we also envision presenting the data spatially and graphically in the future, we felt that factoids are a helpful summary of these data, and a good entry point into the data browser. By clicking on the factoid, citizens bring up tables of data, which in turn are hyperlinked to detailed information about the entities. We envision citizens who use the application being able to generate their own factoids. This allows them to browse the database looking for interesting information and compile it into factoids. In the next phase of development, we will add a feature where citizens can save the factoids and vote on the usefulness of the factoids others have generated.
This application was submitted by GreenRiver.org on August 8, 2009