Extracting knowledge from U.S. department of defense freedom of information act requests with social media

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has facilitated the release of large amounts of government information that has been of great value to researchers, journalists, and other interested parties. The fraction of this information released in electronic format has been growing as has its volume. While offering great potential for research, large amounts of data disgorged from government information systems can pose challenges to human interpretation and knowledge extraction. Using the Office of the Secretary of Defense/Joint Staff Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Logs for 2007–2009, this research identifies (1) a process for finding relationships between the FOIA requests through keywords extracted from Wikipedia and (2) a technique for visualizing these relationships in order to provide context and improve understanding when working with born-digital government data.

► An increasing fraction of the information released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is in electronic format.
► These electronic records can suffer from a lack metadata and context.
► Wikipedia can be used to index electronic government records with diverse contents.
► The records and their index terms can be visualized in order to help promote understanding and learning.