Earlier in the week, Erik Wilde, Eric Kansa, and I published our technical report Proposed Guideline Clarifications for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a set of technical guidelines for how we think recovery.gov should publish data about how stimulus money is being spent and a prototype of what people can do with the data if data were published accordingly. Here's the abstract of our report:
The Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides guidance for a feed-based information dissemination architecture. In this report, we suggest some improvements and refinements of the initial guidelines, in the hope of paving the path for a more transparent and useful feed-based architecture. This report is meant as a preliminary guide to how the current guidelines could be made more specific and provide better guidance for providers and consumers of Recovery Act spending information. It is by no means intended as a complete or final set of recommendations.
The technical heart of the work would be the XSD schemas for communications, formula block grant allocation, and weekly report feeds. But the most fun part is to looking at how some fake data would appear, displayed in a mashup of Google Maps and Simile Timeline. We made up some data because at the time of analysis, there wasn't much in the way of real government data to use. We hope that situation will change soon.
What next for me on this front? Revisiting the questions I posed in my March 7 post (Some questions about the implementation guidelines for the recovery feeds) to see whether I can now answer them.
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