This We Know: Explore U.S. Government Data About Your Community
http://www.thisweknow.org/

Their mission is to present the information the U.S. government collects about every community. By publishing this data in an easy to understand and consistent manner, they seek to empower citizens to act on what’s known. In this first phase of development, they focused on a handful of nationwide data sets from six different agencies in the data.gov catalog. They picked data sets that each had a spatial component. All the data sets were converted to RDF and loaded into a RDF database that serves as the foundation for this website. Their long-term vision for ThisWeKnow is to model the entire data.gov catalog and make it available to the public using Semantic Web standards as a large-scale online database. ThisWeKnow will provide citizens with a single destination where they can search and browse all the information the government collects. It will also provide other application developers with a powerful standards-based API for accessing the data. Loading governmental databases into a single, flexible data store breaks down silos of information and facilitates inferences across multiple data stores. For example, inferences can be made by combining census demographic data from the Agency of Commerce, factory information from the Environmental Protection Agency, information about employment from the Department of Labor, and so on. They can’t even begin to imagine the discoveries that will become possible after all these data are loaded into an integrated repository. Tim Berners-Lee’s describes a Semantic Web with data distributed across the Internet that is readable by people while simultaneously being available and manipulable by software agents. To that end, in addition to building our Web pages for browsing and searching these data, we will expose all the data in the catalog to computers as RDF that can be retrieved via the SPARQL Query Language. This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. This has been added to Business Intelligence Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. This has been added to New Economy Analytics, Resources and Alerts Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.