Data Gov US
= Open Government Data project
Description
"data.gov is a US government web portal providing the public with access to federal government-created datasets. It was launched in 2009, both to allow “citizen feedback and new ideas” – enabling transparency, participation and collaboration between state and citizen – and to increase efficiency among government agencies. Most US government agencies already work to codified information dissemination requirements, and data.gov is conceived as a tool to aid their mission delivery. Like the UK, the US also exhibited a small and influential community of “civic hackers”, working independently and most often without financial reward, to repurpose government-created datasets and present them online in more accessible and enriched formats. For example, in 2004 a student called Josh Tauberer launched GovTrack.us, which repurposes publicly available data about key activities of the US Congress and publishes it in an accessible, searchable form. Perhaps in response to this activity, the CIOs in key states in the US – most notably the District of Columbia - began to release state-level datasets through data portals. It was the CTO for the District of Columbia, Vivek Kundra, who was hired by Obama in March 2009 to act as the Federal CIO.
One of the first memorandums signed by President Obama when he entered the White House was on openness and transparency. As a Senator, Obama’s headline achievements include the Coburn–Obama Transparency Act, which established USAspending.gov, a search engine on federal spending, showing the future President “got” the possibilities early on. Following a period of research and development in the Spring, data.gov was launched on 21 May 2009. It initially contained 76 datasets from 11 government agencies. That number has now risen to 1,284 datasets from 170 government and related public agencies9. Fears that not enough data was being channelled through data.gov led to Obama issuing a decree on 8 December 2009 that each government agency post at least three high-value datasets by a given date10. Indeed, after data.gov.uk launched in January 2010, US commentators began comparing US efforts unfavourably, complaining that the UK site had three times as many useful datasets as the US site, even though it lagged six months behind.
The data.gov website is a curated web portal sitting on top of three separate, searchable data catalogues (“Raw Data Catalog”, “Tool Catalog” and “Geodata Catalog”), each of whose entries include a metadata template based on the Dublin Core standard (Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1). Although data.gov does not host derived applications on its site, it does record the number of times datasets have been downloaded, reporting for the week beginning 19 April 2010, that datasets across all three catalogues had been downloaded over 25,000 times in the past week.
Unlike data.gov.uk, data.gov does not generally employ data formats associated with semantic web development, however, it does include integration with the emerging semantic web as one of its future goals, and is in the process of commissioning pilot projects around semantic web development." (http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/focus/communication/articles_publications/publications/open-data-study-20100519/open-data-study-100519.pdf)