Government Agency Network Discovery via Hyperlinks and Datalinks

In order to improve government transparency and promote interagency coordination, interagency networks have been investigated by social science researchers using data collected using traditional manual mechanisms such as interview and survey. In this paper, we show that World Wide Web (WWW) and Linked Open Data (LOD) can be used to automatically generate interagency networks and thus promote interagency network analysis to a larger scale and more practical status. The outcome of this study includes two independent interagency networks connecting US Federal government agencies, unveiling several interesting interagency connections which have never been seen before.