Howdy Folks…we have a new author joining the crack team at e2oh – Marc Vogtman. Content below is his first post. Welcome aboard, Marc!

- Nate

My Deloitte colleagues, Kate Thompson, Nate Nash, Sam Lampert, and I just attended the fourth annual ICEGOV conference, held in Beijing this year. ICEGOV is a fairly new conference series established by UN University that brings together academics, government representatives, and private companies who have an interest in e-government. This is the first year Deloitte has attended and we did so to present two papers we submitted for the ICEGOV 2010 publication.

It was a pretty interesting week. Beth Noveck, Deputy CTO of the White House’s Open Government Initiative, was one of the keynote speakers and she really drove home the challenges and the goals of interconnected, transparent, virtual government. A major theme, across multiple sessions, was interoperability. Needless to say, this is a huge and complex topic. The goal of allowing people to collaborate and share information within and across government entities requires consideration of organizational, legal, public policy, and technical interoperability issues.

In our business, and particularly in Emerging Markets, we spend a lot of time on the first three. The general consensus seems to be that technology, while important to interoperability, is kind of a given; we have the tools, but successful information sharing hinges on people and process. One set of presenters, Professor Jim Davies and Dr. Steve Harris of Oxford, began their talk by challenging this contention. Yes, people and process are a big part of the process, but are there technology solutions we haven’t considered? There will always be human failure around technology and that’s not something over which we, as development professionals, often have a lot of control. So how can technology be better? How can it control for human failure?

The answer, according to the presenters: computational semantics. You may have heard of this sort of work in the context of semantic web (aka web/enterprise/government 3.0). The basic idea of semantics is that systems should contextualize stored information using machine-readable metadata that enable other software to access that information more intelligently. The idea of computational semantics is that this process should be automated and integrated into the development of ICT systems. This will help minimize the effect of human failure from the developer down to the user. Really fascinating stuff and progress is occurring rapidly.

So, is computational semantics the answer to the problems of interoperability and progress in e-government?

YES!

Well, actually, the honest answer is I have no idea. I’ll leave that question to the software engineers and information theory Phds. But the work in semantics is relevant to us. The government may not be ready for the transition to 3.0 technologies for another decade, but the principles of semantics – of a global methodology for contextualizing data for interoperability – are already implicit in the business opportunities being presented to us. As it turns out, one of the papers Deloitte presented at the conference (written by Sam Lampert) was on the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), a semantic framework created by DoJ and DHS to “develop, disseminate and support enterprise-wide information exchange standards and processes that can enable jurisdictions to effectively share critical information.” NIEM doesn’t yet support the kind of automation described above, but it’s definitely a first step. And it indicates that the principles of semantics are becoming the default way of framing the problem of interoperability and data sharing. We need to think about how this affects the services we provide.