Enigma: Public Data on Steroids

[Dave Guarino]

Hi everyone-

I posted this to a Code for America list, and Juan thought the OpenGov Chicago crowd would be interested as well. See below.

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This is a fairly heterogeneous list, so for those who are blessed to be outside the Valley's epistemic closure, I wanted pass along a note on the TechCrunch Disrupt NY winner, Enigma.

Why should Fuzz possibly care?

Well, remember that time you were like, "oh man, if only I could scrape all of the feds' data and make an awesome interface for it and not have to wait on all the bureaucratic processes to go through..."

The data itself comes from a host of places, but most of Enigma’s government data was obtained by issuing a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. General Services Administration for all the top level .gov domains. From there the team uses crawlers to download all the databases it can find, and algorithmically finds connections between all those data points to create a sort of public knowledge graph. [DG: emphasis mine]

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/30/enigma-makes-unearthing-and-sifting-through-public-data-a-breeze/

Epic.

-- 
Dave Guarino
2013 Fellow
Code for America
da...@codeforamerica.org
http://www.codeforamerica.org