i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Image: Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/

Recently I read a NYTimes article about how the current USA administration has released a big amount of data and how a lot of people are working with it. Particularly there is a group of computer scientists in the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI )  curing this huge amount of data. Their work reminded me one of the questions of the midterm about organizing the White House documents…
 

I think this particular information setup is related with Information Organization and Retrieval and the Organizing System in the following manner:

• What is being organized? : in this case the researchers are organizing datasets of all kind of information, from cigarettes prices to how much economic aid USA government has given through years.

• Why it's been organized? : as part of the openness in the Obama’s organization, this data is been organized in the pursuit of knowledge, insight and to demonstrate government’s transparency allowing the citizens to work and use the data sets.

• How much is it being organized? : the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute team is using a linked data  format to curate the information. This particular format, from where I got the image of this blog post,  and the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework ) enable to interchange information through the Web using different data sources without worrying about a particular schema.

• When is it being organized? : It is being organized both when the data was collected, in structured tables and databases, and now when it's necessary to use it. At the end, this information was organized twice to generate the correct output to the citizenship. 

• Who is organizing it? : A team of computer scientists from RPI, leaded by James Hendler.

This could be your dreamed job? and what else can we do with this information?