The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Open Data: Governments Open Up
It’s been one year since since the US government’s www.data.gov “Open Data” site has been available. On opening day, 47 data sets were available, and now over the past year, that number has expanded to thousands. There have been over 97 million hits on the data and there are hundreds of third party applications built around that data.
The range of data freely available is a bit boggling. Here is a sampling of some of the diversity that’s available:
- Interest Rate Statistics – Daily Treasury Yield Curve Rates (Department of the Treasury)
- Surface Meterorology and Solar Energy (NASA)
- IT Dashboard – Federal IT Spending (Executive Office of the President)
- Federal Register in XML (National Archives)
- Quick Stats (Department of Agriculture)
- U.S. Commercial Nuclear Power Reactors (Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
- Human Caused Fire and Acres (Department of the Interior)
- Electric Current Worldwide (Department of Commerce)
- Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (Social Security Administration)
- FDIC Failed Bank List (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation)
- National Endowment for the Humanities Grant information
- OSHA Chemical Exposure Health Data (Department of Labor)
- Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO, commented on the success so far of the site:
- http://www.federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=150&sid=1961871
“Let’s just think about what it means to put data out there. For example, when the Department of Defense made the decision to release data around satellites a lot of people might have said, ‘Who cares?’ — or when the human genome project, led by the National Institutes of Health and other world bodies, released the gene sequencing data publicly, there were critics who said ‘Who cares?’.
What happened out of both of those efforts is, today, when you and I go into a new town or city, we’re able to use . . . GPS devices that help us navigate a new city. The breakthroughs in scientific discovery as the result of [NIH] to democratize information led to personalized medicine in ways that we’ve never imagined before.”
“As we’re democratizing data, what’s happening is we’re linking open data. So, data from the U.K. To data in the United States to data at the World Bank to data in the city of New York [and] anyone can actually slice and dice information and share it with colleagues, researchers and friends in the same way we share YouTube videos today. That’s the promise of data.gov.”
