Government produces a lot of data — reams of it, roomfuls of it, rivers of it.
It comes in from citizen-submitted forms, fleet vehicles, roadway sensors and traffic lights. It comes from utilities, body cameras and smartphones. It fills up servers and spills into the cloud. It’s everywhere. And often, all that data sits there not doing much.
A governing entity might have robust data collection and it might have an open data policy, but that doesn’t mean it has the computing power, expertise or human capital to turn those efforts into value.
The amount of data available to government and the computing public promises to continue to multiply — the growing smart cities trend, for example, installs networks of sensors on everything from utility poles to garbage bins. Continue…
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