DATA Demo Day May 16th, 2013

Rayburn House, Washington, DC

On Thursday May 16th, Cambridge Semantics (CSI) participated in DATA demo day in Washington, DC. The event, hosted by House majority leader' Eric Cantor, was an opportunity for leading technology vendors to demonstrate how their products could leverage the data standards proposed in the DATA Act to make government spending more transparent and to identify waste and fraud. As a member of the DATA Transparency Coalition, Cambridge Semantics was invited to show how our unified information access software, Anzo, could help with this challenge.

At CSI,  we work with large pharmaceutical and financial enterprises to help them better manage and leverage their data. Anzo is a data integration platform, based on semantic technology, that is very good at combining data from disparate sources into a unified, business consumable model over which you can search, run analytics and build visualizations.

For DATA demo day, we loaded information from recovery.gov and the System for Award Management (SAM) into our platform to demonstrate some key capabilities:

• Ability to easily link together data from very different sources
  
• Present data in models and terms familiar to business users
• Fully interactive search, analysis and visualization of the data
• Examples of how to use the combined data to identify fraud

Recovery.gov contains information about awards by contractor. The SAM data includes information about the contractors such as number of employees. By linking these data sets, in this case by contractor name, we are able to ask some interesting questions. A simple example is looking at the dollar value of awards in relation to the size of the contractor. We can easily highlight the outlying cases of small contractors receiving very big awards. While not necessarily an indication of fraud, the extreme cases are worthy of further investigation.

If the DATA Act is adopted, government spending information will be tagged and made available for public consumption in machine readable formats. Combined with solutions like CSI's semantic platform, this will enable aggregation of spend across agencies and make deep, interactive analysis of the combined data widely accessible.

For more information, please visit www.cambridgesemantics.com or email me at marty@cambridgesemantics.com

@mloughlin