Part A: Information-Centric Other Information:
The rich wealth of information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset with tremendous potential value to
the public, entrepreneurs, and to our own government programs. This information takes many forms. It can be unstructured content
(e.g. press releases, help documents, or how-to guides) or more structured data (e.g. product safety databases, census results,
or airline on-time records). Regardless of form, to harness its value to the fullest extent possible, we must adopt an information-centric
approach to digital services by securely architecting for interoperability and openness from the start. Traditionally, the
government has architected systems (e.g. databases or applications) for specific uses at specific points in time. The tight
coupling of presentation and information has made it difficult to extract the underlying information and adapt to changing
internal and external needs. This has necessarily resulted in a duplication of efforts and the building of multiple systems
to serve different audiences where a single would suffice. For example, most websites are typically built with webpages sized
specifically for computer screens. To serve mobile audiences, many agencies build an entirely new mobile site to present the
same content to federal employees and the public. An information-centric approach decouples information from its presentation.
It means beginning with the data or content, describing that information clearly, and then exposing it to other computers
in a machine-readable format—commonly known as providing web APIs. In describing the information, we need to ensure it has
sound taxonomy (making it searchable) and adequate metadata (making it authoritative). Once the structure of the information
is sound, various mechanisms can be built to present it to customers (e.g. websites, mobile applications, and internal tools)
or raw data can be released directly to developers and entrepreneurs outside the organization. This approach to opening data
and content means organizations can consume the same web APIs to conduct their day-to-day business and operations as they
do to provide services to their customers. In addition, by embedding security and privacy controls into structured data and
metadata, data owners can focus more effort on ensuring the safe and secure delivery of data to the end customer and fewer
resources on securing the device that will receive the data. For example, security of an endpoint device becomes less of a
risk management factor if data is protected and authorized users must authenticate their identities to gain access to it.
The private sector has proven an information-centric model for delivering digital services securely and efficiently. The time
has come for the Federal Government to embrace this approach in stride. Recognizing that simply publishing snapshots of government
information is not enough to make it open, we need to improve the quality, accessibility, timeliness, and usability of our
data and content through well-defined standards that include the use of machine-readable formats such as web APIs and common
metadata tagging schemas.
Objective(s):
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