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Government Data
Recently, President Obama opened up the first Federal Chief Information Officer position available in our Federal government. Vivek Kundra is the man commanding that title. He is using it to form Data.gov.
The U.S. government used to hide data; some things only available through the Freedom of Information Act, the rest buried in one of the government’s ~24,000 websites. Fortunately for us, it won’t be that way anymore. The goal of Data.gov is to organize the government’s information into a massive catalog. For example, the Library of Congress holds roughly 300 terabytes of information. This is only a piece of what Data.gov has to grapple with and organize. The other big goal of Data.gov is to provide the data in a “mashable” format meaning raw data that’s easy to work with and manipulate. Kundra is doing this because he knows that the public can do very different things with the data than the Feds can. This is only the first version of the site and they are only organizing the executive’s data, which is still a large task. I recommend checking this website out. The link can be found below.
LEARN MORE
White House Open Government Initiative
Open Government Initiative Blog
“And Data for All” – Wired.com (PDF)
matt
[Edited by Erty on 2009-11-14 05:41:00]
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