3.4: Data Infrastructure Tools

Include data infrastructure tools that will enhance the Data.gov experience.

Other Information:

The architecture for Data.gov includes data infrastructure tools that will enhance the Data.gov experience. Many of these data infrastructure tools will be developed not by Data.gov but by the expert communities that are most appropriate. For instance, the search data infrastructure tool will come from the work related to USAsearch.gov. The Data.gov architecture includes four data infrastructure tools as detailed below. Data Infrastructure Tool 1 – Collaboration Collaboration related tools will initiate and enable inter‐agency communication as mission owners explore and find other mission owners with similar goals and areas of responsibility. These tools will be built by agencies and to their own functional and business specifications. They will, however, have to adhere to Data.gov’s technical specifications so they may be properly hosted (or accessible from) and utilized on the site. Data Infrastructure Tool 2 – Feedback Data.gov will be able to accommodate a variety of feedback tools as they are developed either internal to the government or by third parties. The feedback tools will allow the general public to engage more efficiently with the Federal government around Federal data sets and the tools can be re‐used across Federal websites. Data Infrastructure Tool 3 – Search Since structured data, like data sets and query results (from query points, discussed previously), can be related to unstructured documents (like web pages indexed by USAsearch.gov), the Data.gov and USAsearch.gov teams are collaborating on an integrated search API and integrated search box widget, as depicted in Figure 12, that can federate search across both sites and return both structured and unstructured results. As depicted in Figure 12, a single integrated search widget can be shared across both the Data.gov and USAsearch.gov websites. This single search widget will use the same integrated search API that will search across both the Data.gov and USAsearch index11 (it could eventually be federated across other sites). The utilization of USAsearch will provide an economy of scale that would not otherwise be achieved had the project team gone about developing its own search capability internally. The user interface (UI) of the search page could look similar to the following figures: As indicated by the notional screenshots, Data.gov’s search page will display to each user the top queries by volume, top queries by trend (rate of change), and a keyword or tag cloud on the right. Additionally, users will have the ability to browse through each community of interest’s specific taxonomy. In the near term, browsing Data.gov catalog holdings will be improved by the Data.gov technical working groups crafting a taxonomy (a hierarchical structure of topics) that allows users to drill‐down by topic area. Data.gov’s search capability will be improved by adding an advanced search feature, end‐user tagging (known as a folksonomy) of datasets and the ability to “search inside” datasets for keywords. The advanced search feature will expand the number of data types that can be selected for search to include XML, RDF and all other formats contained in the catalog. Other advanced discovery mechanisms including geographic searching are being targeted for future releases. The Data.gov team will work with the FGDC to support their development of this capability for integration into the Data.gov solution. Geospatial search would allow an end‐user to draw a bounding box on a map, constrain the results by time or topic areas and then query the Data.gov catalog and visually return the hits that fall into that area. An example of this would be to display icons for any datasets on brownfields in a specific geographic area. In addition to Data.gov implementing this functionality directly the team will explore expanding the APIs as appropriate to include geospatial search by external websites. Figure 14 below is a notional illustration of the concept. Data Infrastructure Tool 4 – Agency and Site Performance Dashboards The agency and site performance dashboards will display the relevant metrics that are collected by the performance and analysis engine. As previously discussed, each agency will collect and share performance metric information with Data.gov through an automated process. This process will standardize the incoming performance data, and then load the data into a viewable dashboard environment that will be displayed to the public, Data.gov personnel, and agency personnel. The public’s performance dashboard will have limited access to the performance metrics. The performance data will be re‐usable across Federal websites as well as by the public.

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

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