When I saw the citability.org premise laid out it made me think of an interesting feature in Freebase called as_of_time. I know from searching for “silona.org freebase” that you commented on their acquisition by Google (o_o) so perhaps you’ve heard of this API? But if not… it has the interesting property of being able to effectively rewind the whole corpus, getting the results of a query as if it were run back in time.

(See section “As Of Time Querying”)
http://www.freebase.com/docs/data/going_meta

I imagine that an unusually powerful citability demo could be built with an interface that used a Freebase-backed schema for the sections/pieces of government documents. Have you or anyone else considered this idea? (currently I get no hits for “citability.org freebase as_of_time”)

While Freebase is not open source, they don’t mind if you experiment in the sandbox. And although they clear the data out weekly you can just programmatically reload demo data when they do. Of course…given the “meta” nature of as_of_time in the graphd engine, “backdating” an edit time in an existing database is not offered, so each new upload would reflect new edit times. A real government project using this method would probably want to import their existing editing history and thus employ a mechanism like graphd’s, but not use Freebase itself.

Also: you seem to share some of my feelings about the tradeoffs of transparency and accountability. So I’d be very curious what you think of my Blackhighlighter project, if you have time to look at it! Feel free to send me any comments or send it on to anyone you know who might be interested.

Thanks!!!