Wazing the information super highway: Linking the world’s open government data resources

Government deals daily with massive volumes of data, and yet poor public-sector information sharing remains a critical government challenge that wastes public funds and put lives at risk. Peled’s book Traversing Digital Babel proposes an innovative solution to improve information sharing inside government by using selective incentives to nudge government officials to exchange data in an automated Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE). Enabled by grants from Google and Yissum, Peled embarked on the first step to creating a testable PSIE prototype: building the world’s first fully-automated corpus of metadata about Open Government Data (OGD) released by local and national governmental agencies worldwide. The OGD corpus currently contains metadata about information assets from 24 different countries, and presents rich opportunities for research including examining and comparing government patterns of information release. The corpus could also enable an innovative model of combined free and for-payment government data release.