Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Last week at the Gov 2.0 Summit Sunlight Labs, a community of open source developers and designers working toward the goal of a more transparent and accountable government, disclosed the results of its Apps for America contest.

Apps had to be designed to take advantage of the data sources or content released at Data.gov and to focus in on the goal of exposing new information to citizens, being usable over an extended period, and looking good. The winners are:

DataMasher: This application from ForumOne Communications helps citizens create mashups that let them rank states' performance on various issues. Among the highest-rated mashups created using the application is one that reveals which states have a proportionately low number of auto accidents compared to the amount of gasoline they use; which states are sporting the most fertile residents; and which state residents favor Democratic candidates over Republican ones by way of weighting their campaign contributions.

GovPulse: The Federal Register - the official journal of the federal government of the U.S. - now can be browsed online (from 1994 on) thanks to the work of this web site. Among the things users can do on this site is search for activities or plans that will affect particular locations across the U.S.; discover what is going on in various topic areas under the feds' domain; or explore the activity of various agencies each week over a 12-month period to learn where it is most active and the topics it generally covers.

No surprise to find that under popular topics for The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, Securities and Reporting and Record-Keeping Requirements take the cake. The minds behind this list themselves on the site by first name only, as developers.

ThisweKnow: Focusing initially on a handful of nationwide data sets from the data.gov catalog, each with a spatial component, and converting them to an RDF format database, it plans to ultimately model the entire data.gov catalog using semantic web standards as a large-scale online database.

It has developed an ontology defining the relationship between fields in the database for the databases so far from the data.gov catalog and plans to grow that to include all databases in the catalog. Currently users can search on a location to get a range of statistics on their community - the number of unemployed, homeowners, earmark requests from nearby organizations, pollutants released into the atmosphere, and number of violent crimes, for example. Semantic web database company Intellidimension, GreenRiver.org and web design studio Sway Design are behind the application to provide citizens with a single portal to exploring all the information in the Data.gov catalog.

It's pretty exciting to see the citizenry and vendor community propel these applications forward. But lest anyone think the federal government itself has solved all the underlying issues that will enable it to fully harness Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies to itself deliver such innovations, Google's Andrew McLaughlin - who took three months off from his day job to be part of the Obama Administration's tech policy transition team -- reminded attendees at the conference last week that some obstacles remain to building innovative applications atop the commodity computing platforms and social networking services that could offer a lower-cost and more efficient way of delivering new capabilities.

That includes federal acquisition and procurement rules that require a competitive bidding process that free online services have no incentive to participate in and which also tend to carry ads that run afoul of federal requirements forbidding implicit endorsement of offerings; challenges around the unlimited liability clauses services tend to specify, which the federal government cannot agree to; problems with legal jurisdiction and venue language boilerplate contract languages; and even whether some of these services meet all the requirements of providing equal access to apps and data to the disabled and the non-disabled. Also an obstacle are some federal agencies' prohibitions against their own employees using social media, seeing it only as a personal outlet rather than potentially a venue for government services and business.

He sounded hopeful, however, that many of the technical and legal issues can be worked around, and that much of the push needs to come around changing the culture of government itself to get better and cheaper government. "That's very hard to do," he admitted, but he believes that the president gets how important it is to move in this direction. "There's a real political alignment around these objectives, but it requires people. We need to seed good people into these different agencies."