Netgain Challenge

Data is a cornerstone asset to governance. But real transparency requires knowledge. There is a difference between civic data mash-ups and robust knowledge services. Much has been achieved for mash-ups; little so far for knowledge management. Governments must expose data but they don’t have and can’t afford tools to do so. The technology is not just about extraction and display, but standardizing and consolidation. That’s required for data to transform into knowledge. Analytics will drive that transformation, but challenges also lie in effective structured data search. When this matures, and if there results broad open government data structured to be transformed into knowledge, then a wealth of information will exist to drive transparency, thanks to commercial innovations emerging in search, analytics, and data science.  Meanwhile, the 1st challenge toward transparency in governance is making the data available in an agreed-to open standardized structure, sequence, and organization.