E-government researchers have suggested that collaborative Wiki software may be the best avenue for getting public information to the citizenry.
They advocate building two-layered Web pages, with the agency providing a base layer of information and interactive pages layered on top that domain experts, volunteers and others could use to annotate and link the data.
The scholarly journal Electronic Government published a paper titled Building Semantic Webs for e-government with Wiki technology in its January issue describing the approach. The paper was authored by Christian Wagner, Karen Cheung and Rachael Ip, all of the City University of Hong Kong, as well as Stefan Böttcher of the University of Paderborn in Germany.
The research lends support to some of the Semantic Web work done in the Federal CIO Council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice, according to Brand Niemann, chair of SICoP.
The researchers are confronting the problem of how agencies can manage the great volume of material they post online. Through a Google search, the research group found there are 368 million Web pages under the federal .gov domain alone. The authors propose using Wiki software to ease the burden of handling all this material.
Their idea is this: In addition to standard Web pages, a second interactive layer could be added to allow outside parties to add contextual information and pull together disparate strands of data. Wiki is collaborative software that allows viewers to edit Web pages. Most Wiki engines use a combination of a server-side scripting language and databases.
The two-layer design owes a debt to database design, the authors concede. The database itself holds the raw data, while additional indexes are placed over top to parse the data in various ways. The agencies would “rely on a community of users to maintain the semantic relationships in the form of a Wiki web,” according to the paper.
This approach “allows you to federate information, spread it around,” said Mills Davis, managing director of Washington consultancy Project10X. Davis is a frequent contributor to SICoP activities. Communities of interest, such as domain experts from different agencies, can get together to explain the data and how it could be used.
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