get_your_government_data

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Get Your Government Data Here!

By: Joanne | May 26, 2009 | Category: General

binary code shone onto a woman's face While at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March, I was surprised by how often I heard that web developers are eager to get their hands on government data. Nobody ever told me what they want to do with it, but clearly they want to get their hands on it and get to work.

I bet a lot of them have business ideas. It’s an old model – take information that the government collects, repackage it in a way that people find valuable, and then sell it.

Until recently the problem was that the data existed, but it was hard to get, and it was often formatted in ways that were hard for developers to work with. Things are changing rapidly. XML format (eXtensible Markup Language – it’s a format for structured documents and data on the web) made it a bit easier for the government to share data.

Last week the government launched the highly anticipated data.gov. Data.gov is a web site intended to increase public access to data collected by the government. For most of us (myself included), the data.gov website isn’t going to be where we go when we’re looking for government information. Why? Because all this data is in machine-readable form – which means it’s not displayed in a way that’s usable for the average human.

But that’s where the fun begins. Web developers take the mountains of raw data, apply a spark of genius, and voila! They come up with a product that’s useful for you and me. There’s even a contest for web developers to use data from data.gov to create compelling applications. I can’t wait to see what they do.