Data.gov Puts The Government At Your Fingertips

Data.gov Puts The Government At Your Fingertips

One of the things that every party can agree to is that the Obama Administration is doing an amazing job at using today’s technology to reach the public. Data.gov takes this idea and sets the foundation for how government data will be accessed and analyzed for years to come.

More in Internet | July 10th, 2009

Have you ever actually been to Data.gov, let alone heard of it? It’s quite interesting.

As a priority Open Government Initiative for President Obama’s administration, Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets. The data catalogs will continue to grow as datasets are added. Federal, Executive Branch data are included in the first version of Data.gov.

There are three ways to find useful information; through the “Raw” Data Catalogue, the Tools Catalogue, and the Geodata Catalogue.

“Raw” Data Catalogue
Through this method you’ll be able to find/download platform-independent, machine readable data (e.g., XML, CSV, KMZ/KML, or shape file formats), as well as a link to a metadata page specific to the respective dataset. To put that in plain english that means that whatever documents you find you’ll be able to download the raw information in different file types. CSV and XLS seem to be the most popular at the moment. Searching through this method can be a little strange for the first time user that doesn’t really know what he/she is looking for, but with some direction this is awesome. You can also reorder your results based on the type of file that you need which is a nice touch when generating lots of them.

Tools Catalogue
This is probably the most interesting part of the site. You’re able to find information based on government agency (FEMA, DHS, CDC, etc), category (Health and Nutrition, Science and Technology, etc), and more, including results that have web widgets. It also provides Data Mining and Extraction Tools which allow you to produce maps, tables, or charts of the subset of data that are specific to your interests or to build your own dataset taken from a data source. Pretty neat stuff.