When I first heard that Vivek Kundra was on the short list to be the CTO of the United States, I was very excited about the possibility that he would implement information sharing at a national level like he had in DC. Today I’m happy to read that that the Federal CIO Council has launched Data.gov:
The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data.
OK, so it’s still in beta, but I’m still gratified to see this step toward government transparency. And what a boon to information retrieval researchers looking for public data sets!
The Noisy Channel 
2 replies on “Data.gov”
hey thats pretty cool stuff. a good move forward. ive already set a masters student on to the energy consumption data.
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On a similar note, the city of Vancouver is motioning to embrace open standards, open data and open source architecture, citing transparency and maximized utility and innovation:
http://eaves.ca/2009/05/14/vancouver-enters-the-age-of-the-open-city/
This sort of change is quite amazing when it happens.
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