OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm

The track record on this is mixed. This not simple, because of the extreme variety of budgetary presentations and supporting analysis. This idea sounds like the "Full Employment Act of 2009" for the IT industry.

Even if track record on this is hard, it is a project worth pursuing.

misguided... citability.pbworks.com

Citability is the way that you can chain EVERYONE's XML budget and see how the actual dollar is spent.

You can't do it all in one document. It is a series of 19 bills and they get distributed to different agencies and state governments. The one document would be too large scale to be useful - for an example see the current PDF's that are available eg 980 mi to dept of agriculture...

Regardless of how many documents may contain the data, the key point is that they should be available on the Web in a standard XML format that enables indexing, aggregation, and analyses.

Lots of XML ideas on this site, but the bigger idea is that it needs to be accessible and tangible. An Excel doc or other tangible format would be fine too.

A Single XML document is a good idea. While a single XML may be unwieldy as the final form that any application uses it is a reasonable way to distribute the budget. Multiple XML documents would also be acceptable even if the schemas are different; while not ideal, if the number of documents and schemas is low (5-50?) then it is not unreasonable (although non ideal) to parse these separately. If multiple documents were provided a set of XSLs could be written to transform (and potentially combine) these to a single schema.

If the budget is available in XML, either one or multiple, it would be helpful if there is a mechanism to identify when a new budget XML document is posted; there are many reasonable approaches to this.

While there are other formats that would also work, XML tools are widely available in all popular languages (C, C++, Java, Ruby, Javascript, PHP, Perl, Erlang etc.).

Other formats present issues. PDFs which can be very difficult to parse. However the human readable PDF(s) could be created from the XML using FOP or similar. Excel formats are proprietary and many languages do not easily import native Excel documents. Applications such as Excel, Open Office, iWork can all import XML documents, so if some find it easier to work with Excel (or other applications) then the XML can be imported into these applications.

I will submit a related idea which is a simple web service (REST for now) that can be used to get information from various data sources, including the budget. I will double check to make sure that this has not already been suggested.