On Feb. 26, municipal analysts gathered in Philadelphia to discuss the future of data analytics and the need for data standards in municipal disclosure. Nutshell Associates' President Liz Sweeney talked about the trend among the federal and certain state governments to adopt data standards for reporting. Several of these mandates will require local governments to report certain information as fully-machine readable structured data, unlike current reporting, which is typically by PDF. "There are many linkages between various levels of government, including intergovernmental transfers, loans, and grants, and there is a lot of intergovernmental data collection." said Ms. Sweeney. "When one level of government wants to consume data in machine-readable, fully searchable format, it's going to want to upstream data that way from lower levels of government". Morgan Stanley's Mark Schmidt discussed his research using natural language processing to identify risks in municipal disclosure. Together, these trends stand to offer powerful new ways to access and utilize data and better understand municipal risk.
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