This We Know
Data.gov is an amazing resource that makes information the U.S. government collects about every community free and widely available. It's one drawback, however, is that it's designed for data and policy experts and lacks a way for the general public to search across the available catalog. To make the Data.gov catalog more accessible and appealing, we developed ThisWeKnow.org, a single online destination that provides a simple, browsable format for exploring large sections of the Data.gov catalog.
To manage the amount of information that Data.gov makes available, we developed a 'factoid' approach for ThisWeKnow.org that presents queries as simple sentences that describe a city or town. For example, a search for Los Angeles returns a factoid that "38,663 people were diagnosed with cancer" in the county. Searching by location is a common online task for most people and this familiar entry point makes it easy to type your in zip code and start exploring the data browser.
ThisWeKnow.org is built on an RDF semantic database and contains around 55 million data sentences, or what is often called "triples" in RDF language, that describe city and town locations. We designed the site's software with a modular user interface that allows developers to drop in new datasets easily without having to re-architect the site structure.
