Visualizing Recovery Funding Requests and Spending

ari.knausenberger@strategi-consulting.com — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:30:02 GMT

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act calls for an unprecedented level of spending on a variety of programs, projects, and initiatives across the country. Ensuring the timely delivery of funds to those in need while limiting fraud, waste, and abuse presents both a challenge to those managing the effort, and opportunity to increase the transparency of government spending.

In support of this transparency effort, a number of sites have emerged that are dedicated to tracking stimulus project spending and helping people visualize, analyze and understand how stimulus funding is being allocated. Although these sites represent great steps in the right direction, none provide a robust geospatial mapping component, which can help make understanding and interpreting the vast array of stimulus data easier.

To illustrate some of the ways recovery spending can be visualized, we leveraged data from StimulusWatch.org to create a series of geospatial mashups using Microsoft's Virtual Earth.

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Abstraction: The key understanding cloud computing

ari.knausenberger@strategi-consulting.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:33:29 GMT

"I have no idea what anyone is talking about," – Larry Ellison, CEO Oracle Corp. talking about cloud computing, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal's article The Internet Industry Is on a Cloud -- Whatever That May Mean

Mr. Ellison is not alone. It's quite possible that if you ask 10 experts what they think cloud computing is you may get 10 answers. Even if nobody knows what cloud computing really is, one thing is certain: if internet searches are any indication of interest and uptake, this year will be a big year for cloud computing. A quick search on Google Trends reveals that just this year, the volume of searches for "cloud computing" began to overtake searches for the more mainstream topics like "virtualization".

So what's all the buzz about? Is cloud-computing revolutionary, or

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Strategi Consulting

Visualizing Recovery Funding Requests and Spending

Abstraction: The key understanding cloud computing