Data.gov to go online in May

Posted by Claude Aiken on Apr 7, 2009 in Breaking News, Tech Law | 0 comments

Great news for open government advocates.  Under the guidance of Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s CIO, the federal government will begin the process of making massive amounts of non-classified government data available on Data.gov.

The project, which is slated to go live in late May, is likely to be available in XML and exposed via the traditional HTTP GET, POST, PUT and DELETE operations.  The news on this project is pretty sparse so far.  For example it’s not entirely clear how different or more extensive this project is than http://www.usgovxml.com, a compendium of government XML datasets that are publicly available.   It is clear, though, that the mastermind behind this effort is the same one who is responsible for DC’s public data catalog.  For those interested in reading more, Wired has a good Wiki entry that catalogs the some of the current datasets available, how they can be made better, and suggestions for how data.gov should be run.  Enjoy.