after blogging about Stimulus Feeds Done Right and some Stimulus Feed Details that would be good to see, i was of course excited to find the first stimulus feed in the wild! it is from the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s recovery web site and available at http://www.nsf.gov/recovery/weekly.atom. as of now, the feed has one entry, and that entry is basically an empty shell pointing to an Excel spreadsheet via atom:link[@rel='alternate'].
it is a bit disappointing to see this intransparent approach being pursued, but given the current state of the guidelines, the way it is done is perfectly in line with the guidelines. in order to get to any useful information other than the fact that something has been made available on 2009-03-03T14:30:00-05:00 (the timestamp in the feed), it is necessary to parse a document in a proprietary format (the Excel is not even published in OOXML but in the older binary format).
one problem is that the implementation guidelines do talk about feeds, but it seems as if the OMB's information flow relies on the emails that are being sent to them. so there is probably too little incentive for the OMB to make sure that the feeds really are a sufficient way of getting to the relevant information. if government agencies were required to eat their own dog food, they would have more incentives to implement transparency robustly.
however, this would still not solve the problem of opaque file formats. it would be interesting to know whether there are free tools available that would be able to reliably extract the relevant information from Excel spreadsheets. regardless of that, it seems to me that the far easier and better way would be to mandate open formats and ask for the information to be (a) contained in the feed itself, and (b) in an easily and robustly accessible format such as XML or XHTML + microformat.
Has anyone tried to interpret the semantics of the spreadsheet entry?
What is the significance of "Program Source/ Treasury Account Symbol: Agency Code"?
How about "Program Source/Treasury Account Symbol: Account Code"?
Anyone point to a primer on stimulus accounting?
Posted by: Raymond Yee | Wednesday, March 04, 2009 at 16:43
@raymond: pages 55-57 of the guidelines have these tables that say "Based on Recovery Act Guidance, Recovery Act, and FFATA", so these are probably the sources that should have complete definitions of what these fields mean. for now, i'd be glad to be simply able to reliably find these fields based on the feeds; finding out what they mean is of course important, but not my main concern right now. but i assume that there is some well-defined description somewhere in those documents.
Posted by: dret | Wednesday, March 04, 2009 at 19:02