The Obama administration launched Data.gov on Thursday to "open government and democratize information." Some of the initial reviews:
"the initial offering is a bit of a let down"
"already a very powerful set of tools"
"providing raw data is inherent to establishing trust"
What do you think?
COMMENTS
The last Administration did far more, and said far less, to open up government to public review. Obama has it easy--he can follow in the footsteps of his MBA predecessor while talking a good game and reaping the benefits.
Ron 05/27/09 03:08 pm ET
Data.gov seems like a decent first step, but needs to refine it's approach to deal with different sets of users: 1) the curious and web developers... these are the only people who care about scanning through widgets. 2) People with specific questions they want answered. If I want to know how many of my tax dollars go to defense, or what the average price of an appendectomy is, some tool that would sort through info sources would be awesome. 3) Researchers. For researchers, data sets should be indexed by what information is on the files, what the units of analysis are, the time period covered, what user agreement standards are neccesary, etc.
Right now, the tool is pretty much useless, because everything is jumbled together. General topic areas don't provide the specificity needed to find anything, and an agency search is silly... if people know which agency has the data they want, they will have an easier time finding it through the agency web site or google. What's needed is the ability to hone in through user-meaningful categories.
Brian J 05/27/09 11:36 am ET
Like the previous comments, the first release of data.gov appears to me to be quite limited. At best, it's data accessibility on trainer wheels. Much further to go.
Here is a link to a presentation about how to incorporate semantic technologies to achieve a more citizen friendly data.gov (and recovery.gov).
http://tinyurl.com/semantic-data
Mills Davis 05/26/09 02:18 pm ET
I am a heavy user of government economic and technology data. I like the idea of having open access to government data -- especially since I am a taxpayer who has funded the data collection effort! Data.gov is barely functioning, but still you can see how it will work by looking at its data search features. I just stepped through the Data.gov site and don't see where it offers any advantage over doing a Google search. For example, if I want export-import data, I can simply enter "export-import data" into the Google search engine and instantly get a number of pertinent hits, because the Department of Commerce has already made such data publicly available. The same search on Data.gov is trickier. Once it is fully developed, it will likely be more cumbersome to use than Google, because Google allows free-form searches whereas it appears Data.gov will require carefully worded search terms.
R Solis 05/22/09 04:38 pm ET
Too many people are enamored way too soon. It may only be a cosmetic change that makes people feel "so good" without substance to demonstrate benefits.
Smoke screens come and blow away.
Joyce Schulte 05/22/09 11:15 am ET