Balisage Paper: Meeting the Twin Challenges of Open Data for DATA Act compliance and Delivering next generation Industry Services
Leveraging XML template and dictionary technologies with public semantic methods for real-time service interface delivery
David R. R. Webber
Project Lead for Open Data and NIEM
Oracle Public Sector
Creative Commons License Attribution v4.0 International
Abstract
The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) was signed into law in May, 2014. A legislative mandate for data transparency, the act requires the US Department of the Treasury and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to change the recording of U.S. federal spending into open standardized data formats that must be published online. Disclosure that can currently take months or years must now be available directly. New tools and methodologies will be required to meet this challenge, hopefully based on open public semantic techniques, shared vocabularies, and common service specifications. Implementations of the NIEM model (National Information Exchange Model) have lessons and techniques that may help, and open source and public tool sets are available. Illustrations from health care services, financial reporting, emergency preparedness, election management, and municipal services across the United States, Europe, and Asia show these new techniques successfully utilized.