The interoperability of US federal government information: Interoperability

Interoperability sets standards for consistency when integrating information from multiple sources. Trends in e-government have encouraged the production of digital information yet it is not clear if the data produced are interoperable. The objective of the project was to evaluate interoperability by building a retrieval tool that could track United States public policy from the legislative to the executive branch using only machine-readable government information. A case study of policy created during the 2008 financial crisis serves as an illustration to investigate the organizational, technical, syntactic, and operational interoperability of digital sources. The methods of citing law varied widely enough between legislation and regulation to impede consistent automated tracking. The flow of federal policy authorization exemplifies remaining socio-technical challenges in achieving the interoperability of machine-readable government data.