Utilizing the Federal Enterprise Architecture to Open Up the Government - A Private Citizen's Guide to Government Data

The federal government used the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) to organize itself. The Federal Enterprise Architecture effort began several years ago with the goal of providing the government better control over reuse and redundancy between agencies.

With the advent of the Government Transparency initiative, the FEA has found a new charter. Government information is now available to private citizens on a scale never before seen. And this information is being published in reusable ways using technologies like RSS, RDFa and XML. This makes it possible for private citizens to access current information for their own watchdog applications.

But the truth behind the data can still be obfuscated by making the data too inscrutable. True government transparency relies on an understandable organization of data. This is where the FEA comes back in. The same enterprise architecture that makes government data manageable by the government can be used by private citizens to make sense of the newly available government data.

Survey of available data sources like data,gov, recovery.gov, oegov, governmentspending.gov, etc.
Outline of the FEA and its importance
How to merge this data in meaningful ways, including tips and tricks
Application demonstration

Ralph Hodgson is a co-founder and the CTO of TopQuadrant, a US-based company that specializes in semantic technology consulting, training, and tools. He combines expertise in semantic technologies with over 25 years of experience in business application development and deployment, consulting, software development, and strategic planning. Prior to starting TopQuadrant in 2001, he held executive consulting positions at IBM Global Services where he was a founding member of Portal Practice and Object Technology Practice. Prior to IBM, he was European Technology Director, founder, and Managing Director of Interactive Development Environments, which was an international CASE tools vendor. Between 1996 and 2000, he organized the OOPSLA workshops on "System Envisioning." He is a published author and a frequent speaker at conferences. Recent books he has co-authored are Adaptive Information, published by John Wiley in 2004, and Capability Cases: A Solution Envisioning Approach, published by Addison-Wesley in July 2005.