Super interesting post from O’Reilly’s Vanessa Fox on the (un)findability of government data, which is an essential underpinning of the MashableCity effort. Although Fox’s focus in the article is on search, I think there is also a role here for a concept browsing approach that unifies data from the user perspective, rather than silo-ing it along government agency lines.

From O’Reilly Radar:

Thursday on this blog, Congressman Honda asked, “how can congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government?” He noted that “A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met. Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.” He asked for input on what web 2.0 features he should add to his website to take advantage of today’s online world.

Full article here…