3.1.3: Data Architecture
Make information available, easy to find, and easily manipulated, aggregated, and/or re-published. Other Information:
Transparency, collaboration, and participation depend upon information which is available, easy to find, and easily manipulated,
aggregated, and/or re-published. Achieving these efficiencies is the explicit goal of data architecture and should be considered
amongst the Department’s highest technical priorities. While this task is daunting for an enterprise such as the DOT, it can
be achieved incrementally. Each step or milestone will yield tangible gains in the three Open Government goals of transparency,
participation, and collaboration. A long-standing obstacle to the implementation of Federal data architectures has been the
lack of robust, yet flexible, metadata standards suitable to the Government’s diverse data requirements. This obstacle has
now been overcome within the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) co-developed by the U.S. Departments of Justice and
Homeland Security. Departments can leverage NIEM to build upon a collection of metadata repositories that are global in their
applicability but also narrowly defined into domains. Over the next year, DOT will consider working with the NIEM Program
Management Office (PMO) to develop a Transportation Domain for inclusion in established NIEM data standards. An immediate
outcome of applying the NIEM to existing Department datasets is the ability to create a cross-modal data catalog that business
users, developers, and the public to identify, locate, and obtain information more easily and intuitively. A Departmental
cross-modal data catalog would assist in transitioning existing non-open data sets into more open formats. These could then
be more easily shared within the Department as well as externally to the public. The Department will consider establishing
policies and procedures for the rigorous inclusion of all Data.gov submitted datasets within the Department’s data catalog.
In accomplishing these steps, the Department will incrementally build its capacity to support increased transparency, collaboration,
and participation by providing steadily improving access to the information our customers depend upon.
Indicator(s):
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