FOI automation—a distant pipedream

Andrew at IMPACT blog points us to this press release from the Information Commissioner's Office (my bold):

Freedom of Information is fast becoming a fixed feature of 21st century democracy and should not be seen as a battle ground between public bodies and the people, according to the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas. Speaking at the annual FOI Live conference in London on 24 May, the Information Commissioner [stated] that the transparency and accountability brought by Freedom of Information reinforce good government, and should not be seen as a threat. However, he will also stress that those using FOI must act responsibly.

Readers will know that I believe that the trend towards information transparency is ineluctable, so I quite agree with the Information Commissioner on that point.

But what of the misuse of the FOI that his last sentence touches on? Of course, if search technologies could step up to automate the resolution of FOI requests properly (which it falls so far short of doing right now), the problem of human resources in government and business being stretched by nuisance FOI requests would disappear.

However, to achieve such automation, we would need to develop search technologies that can mediate the individual, richly-structured, socially and semantically contextualised ways people think and express themselves. And even Google is light years away from achieving that goal.

In the meantime, it is hard to see how government and business—and indeed the legal system—can avoid the overhead of having human beings sort through FOI requests written in natural language in order to make judgement calls over the validity of those requests.