I don't usually do first-person blogging for DGI, but this development merits stepping out of that role. I just read a 3 April 2011 post on the blog of Beth Noveck, a New York Law School professor (and former White House official), about ORGPedia: The Open Organizational Data Project. I have not been following the "organizational data" trend, but perhaps others reading this have been. Noveck's blog post reports: "On March 30th twenty economists, technologists, and government officials (Download Participant List) convened in person and by telephone at the Sloan Foundation in New York to discuss creating an open numbering scheme and platform to facilitate the comparison of data about organizations across levels of government and agencies."
From the blog post:
This ORGPedia project is convening a wide range of experts to inform the design and scope of:
- An open legal identifier system to enable datasets about companies to be compared. Currently, different agencies use different numbering schemes. An open ID will enable taxonomies to “talk” to one another.
- An Application Programming Interface (API) and supporting software libraries to make it easy for third parties to incorporate ORGPedia into their own systems.
- An online platform to mash up and visualize authenticated government datasets already collected about firms and organizations pursuant to statute or regulation.
- A community to encourage public participation in reviewing, annotating and contributing to collected government data whether by companies and organizations or by third parties.
Read the full post and the comments for complete information. Is anyone in SLA/DGI involved? If not, read the blog post for opportunities.
Hi Peggy:
I've been working on some of these issues for several years. You might find my working paper, Connecting the Dots for Democratic Accountability, of interest. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1728882
--J.H. Snider, President
iSolon.org
Posted by: J.H. Snider | April 06, 2011 at 11:43 AM