CSEE Professors Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi are helping to organize a symposium this fall on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges that will be held in Arlington Virginia sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The symposium will address the technical and social challenges involved in publishing public government data in ways that make the meaning more explicit and enable reuse.

Websites like data.gov, research.gov and USASpending.gov aim to improve government transparency, increase accountability, and encourage public participation by publishing public government data online. Although this data has been used for some intriguing applications, it is difficult for citizens to understand and use. The symposium will explore how AI technologies such as the Semantic Web, linked data, information extraction, statistical analysis and machine learning can be used to make the knowledge embedded in the data more explicit, accessible and reusable. The symposium’s location of Washington, DC will facilitate the participation of U.S. federal government agency members and enable interchange between researchers and practitioners.