Data – Page 16 – Public Intelligence Blog

Posted: 11 Jun 2013 11:04 AM PDT

The U.S. Government is trying to improve the American dream by making sure that its citizens have access to some of the government’s arsenal of information. According to the Whitehouse article “Executive Order — Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information” the U.S. Government is putting their plan into action.

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. General Principles. Openness in government strengthens our democracy, promotes the delivery of efficient and effective services to the public, and contributes to economic growth. As one vital benefit of open government, making information resources easy to find, accessible, and usable can fuel entrepreneurship, innovation, and scientific discovery that improves Americans’ lives and contributes significantly to job creation.”

The U.S. Government already has already made some information readily available such as weather data from the Global Position System. Thanks to this we can predict weather patterns, issue warnings and use location based applications. Other data resources such as health, medicine, education, public safety and other areas have experienced growth thanks to the free machine-readable information data posted on Data.gov. The government wants to continue to promote both job and economic growth so they have devised a plan to ensure that not only data is released but that it is made easily accessible to the public. In the world where we find much of our information out by clinging to the news or online sources hoping we can catch a glimpse into the world of the U.S. Government it’s refreshing for them to acknowledge our need for information and give us something to grow on and really get us going.

April Holmes, June 12, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Government Opens Information Highway — Sort Of”

2013/06/042013/06/04

Patrick Meier: Data Mining Wikipedia in Real Time for Disaster Response [or Any Current Event]

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Geospatial, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience

Data Mining Wikipedia in Real Time for Disaster Response

My colleague Fernando Diaz has continued working on an interesting Wikipedia project since he first discussed the idea with me last year. Since Wikipedia is increasingly used to crowdsource live reports on breaking news such as sudden-onset humanitarian crisis and disasters, why not mine these pages for structured information relevant to humanitarian response professionals?

In computing-speak, Sequential Update Summarization is a task that generates useful, new and timely sentence-length updates about a developing event such as a disaster. In contrast, Value Tracking tracks the value of important event-related attributes such as fatalities and financial impact. Fernando and his colleagues will be using both approaches to mine and analyze Wikipedia pages in real time. Other attributes worth tracking include injuries, number of displaced individuals, infrastructure damage and perhaps disease outbreaks. Pictures of the disaster uploaded to a given Wikipedia page may also be of interest to humanitarians, along with meta-data such as the number of edits made to a page per minute or hour and the number of unique editors.

Fernando and his colleagues have recently launched this tech challenge to apply these two advanced computing techniques to disaster response based on crowdsourced Wikipedia articles. The challenge is part of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), which is being held in Maryland this November. As part of this applied research and prototyping challenge, Fernando et al. plan to use the resulting summarization and value tracking from Wikipedia to verify related crisis information shared on social media. Needless to say, I’m really excited about the potential. So Fernando and I are exploring ways to ensure that the results of this challenge are appropriately transferred to the humanitarian community. Stay tuned for updates.

See also: Web App Tracks Breaking News Using Wikipedia Edits [Link]

2013/05/22

Patrick Meier: Automatic Processing of Tweets & Crowd-Sourced Reports

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Geospatial, Innovation, Mobile

Automatically Classifying Crowdsourced Election Reports

As part of QCRI’s Artificial Intelligence for Monitoring Elections (AIME) project, I liaised with Kaggle to work with a top notch Data Scientist to carry out a proof of concept study. As I’ve blogged in the past, crowdsourced election monitoring projects are starting to generate “Big Data” which cannot be managed or analyzed manually in real-time. Using the crowdsourced election reporting data recently collected by Uchaguzi during Kenya’s elections, we therefore set out to assess whether one could use machine learning to automatically tag user-generated reports according to topic, such as election-violence. The purpose of this post is to share the preliminary results from this innovative study, which we believe is the first of it’s kind.

Read full post with graphics.

Over 1 Million Tweets from Oklahoma Tornado Automatically Processed

My colleague Hemant Purohit at QCRI has been working with us on automatically extracting needs and offers of help posted on Twitter during disasters. When the 2-mile wide, Category 4 Tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, he immediately began to collect relevant tweets about the Tornado’s impact and applied the algorithms he developed at QCRI to extract needs and offers of help.

Read full post

2013/05/162013/05/16

Michel Bauwens: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

Advanced Cyber/IO, Architecture, Civil Society, Data, Design, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Software, Worth A Look

People are raving about this as a possible alternative command and control system for the public to use.

Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

Jeff Atwood

Coding Horror, February 5, 2013

EXTRACT:

After spending four solid years thinking of discussion as the established corrupt empire, and Stack Exchange as the scrappy rebel alliance, I began to wonder – what would it feel like to change sides? What if I became a champion of random, arbitrary discussion, of the very kind that I'd spent four years designing against and constantly lecturing users on the evil of?

I already built an X-Wing; could I build a better Tie Fighter?

Today we announce the launch of Discourse, a next-generation, 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

The goal of the company we formed, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., is exactly that – to raise the standard of civilized discourse on the Internet through seeding it with better discussion software:

100% open source and free to the world, now and forever.
Feels great to use. It's fun.
Designed for hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers.
Built in moderation and governance systems that let discussion communities protect themselves from trolls, spammers, and bad actors – even without official moderators.

Our amazingly talented team has been working on Discourse for almost a year now, and although like any open source software it's never entirely done, we believe it is already a generation ahead of any other forum software we've used.

Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit”

2013/05/112014/03/18

Rickard Falkving: USG Claims Ownership of CAD Files for Printable Weapons — Public Response? Har Har.

Data, Design

United States Government Shows The World It Doesn’t Understand The Internet, Claims “Ownership” Of Specific Files

Infopolicy: The United States Department of Defense has “claimed ownership” of CAD drawings of a plastic, printable pistol. In doing so, they apparently believe they can stop the files from existing. The result is obviously the complete opposite, which calls into strong question the judgment and ability of United States Government to set Internet policy at all.

Read full article.

2013/05/10

Stephen E. Arnold: Open Source Trends for [Content Management System] CMS in 2013

Data, Software

Open Source Trends for [Content Management System] CMS in 2013

Beyond Search, May 10, 2013

CMS Wire does a great job of providing a monthly update of the latest in CMS news and releases. In their latest edition for the month of May, open source software is taking the spotlight. Read all the details in their article, “Alert: What’s Coming Up for Open Source CMS in May 2013.”

Here is a portion of the many new releases, updates, and products they cover:

“Every month we like to serve up a little open source CMS roundup, and like most months in this busy segment, May is packed with interesting tidbits . . . Content, portal and collaboration expert Liferay has announced an integration with Tibco this week, and the two companies have developed a combined product that will itself integrate with multiple systems. Liferay Portal will begin offering several enterprise Connectivity Adapters that use Tibco’s ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks starting in the third quarter, the company announced.”

Liferay is definitely up to good things as they seek to round out their portal offerings. But the emphasis on open source offerings should encourage users with enterprise needs to explore offerings outside of the realm of CMS. For instance, LucidWorks offers all-encompassing enterprise search for organizations that need a solution ready to go, but can choose to do some customization as desired. The best part is that solutions like LucidWorks are built upon the best of open source strength (in their case Apache Lucene/Solr) but are fully supported with training and customer service.

Emily Rae Aldridge, May 10, 2013

2013/05/092013/05/09

Steven Aftergood: Making Government Information Open and Machine Readable

Data

Making Government Information Open and Machine Readable

An executive order issued by President Obama today directs that “the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable.”

“As one vital benefit of open government, making information resources easy to find, accessible, and usable can fuel entrepreneurship, innovation, and scientific discovery that improves Americans’ lives and contributes significantly to job creation,” states Executive Order 13642 on Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information.

The new order was welcomed by the Sunlight Foundation, a proponent of open access to government data, particularly because it establishes a requirement to produce an inventory of “datasets that can be made publicly available but have not yet been released.” That will facilitate enforcement and advancement of the open data agenda, Sunlight said.

While one wants to believe in the efficacy of the order and to affirm the good faith intentions behind it, it is necessary to recognize how remote it is from current practice, particularly in the contentious realm of national security information.

The CIA, for example, has stubbornly refused to release the contents of its CREST database of declassified documents, even though the documents contained there are entirely declassified. The CREST database is not open, it’s not machine-readable, and you can’t have a copy.

Meanwhile, the Obama White House itself has refused to publish even its unclassified Presidential Policy Directives (with a few exceptions), forcing requesters to litigate for access, or to surrender.