Web Services for Recovery.gov

One of the main goals of the Recovery.gov Web site is to provide information about how funds for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 are allocated and spent. In this report, we propose a reporting architecture that would focus on the reporting services rather than the Web site and page design, and that uses these Web services to build the user-facing part of ARRA reporting. Our proposed architecture is based on simple and well-established Web technologies, and the main goal of this architecture is to provide citizens and watchdog groups simple and easy access to machine-readable data. Our architecture uses a more sophisticated framework than simple downloads of data files. Our proposed architecture is based on the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST) and uses established and widely supported Web technologies such as feeds and XML. We argue that such an architecture is easy to design and implement, easy to understand for users, and easy to work with for those who want to access ARRA reporting data in a machine-readable way.

[1]  Erik Wilde,et al.  Proposed Guideline Clarifications for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 , 2009 .

[2]  Huajun Chen,et al.  The Semantic Web , 2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[3]  David Beech,et al.  XML-Schema Part 1: Structures Second Edition , 2004 .

[4]  Wendy Hall,et al.  The Semantic Web Revisited , 2006, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[5]  Erik Wilde,et al.  Feeds as Query Result Serializations , 2009, ArXiv.

[6]  Erik Wilde,et al.  The Plain Web , 2008 .

[7]  Mirina Grosz,et al.  World Wide Web Consortium , 2010 .

[8]  Roy T. Fielding,et al.  Principled design of the modern Web architecture , 2000, Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2000 the New Millennium.

[9]  Joe Gregorio,et al.  The Atom Publishing Protocol , 2004 .

[10]  Douglas Crockford,et al.  The application/json Media Type for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) , 2006, RFC.

[11]  E. Felten,et al.  Government Data and the Invisible Hand , 2009 .

[12]  Arvind Malhotra,et al.  XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition , 2004 .

[13]  Erik Wilde,et al.  Feed Querying as a Proxy for Querying the Web , 2009, FQAS.

[14]  James A. Hendler,et al.  The Semantic Web" in Scientific American , 2001 .

[15]  Sam Ruby,et al.  RESTful Web Services , 2007 .

[16]  Mark Nottingham,et al.  Feed Paging and Archiving , 2007, RFC.

[17]  Mark Nottingham,et al.  The Atom Syndication Format , 2005, RFC.

[18]  Michael Hausenblas,et al.  Exploiting Linked Data to Build Web Applications , 2009, IEEE Internet Computing.

[19]  Erik Wilde.  Structuring namespace descriptions , 2006, WWW '06.