Closing In On A Million Open Government Data Sets by Jennifer Zaino.
From the post:
A million data sets. That’s the number of government data sets out there on the web that we have closed in on.
“The question is, when you have that many, how do you search for them, find them, coordinate activity between governments, bring in NGOs,” says James A. Hendler, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor, Department of Computer Science and Cognitive Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a principal investigator of its Linking Open Government Data project lives, as well as Internet web expert for data.gov, He also is connected with many other governments’ open data projects. “Semantic web tools organize and link the metadata about these things, making them searchable, explorable and extensible.”
To be more specific, Hendler at SemTech a couple of weeks ago said there are 851,000 open government data sets across 153 catalogues from 30-something countries, with the three biggest representatives, in terms of numbers, at the moment being the U.S., the U.K, and France. Last week, the one million threshold was crossed.
About 410,000 of these data sets are from the U.S. (federal, state, city, county, tribal included), including quite a large number of geo-data sets. The U.S. government’s goal is to put “lots and lots and lots of stuff out there” and let people figure out what they want to do with it, he notes.
My question about data that “..[is] searchable, explorable and extensible,” is whether anyone wants to search, explore or extend it?
Simply piling up data to say you have a large pile of data doesn’t sound very useful.
I would rather have a smaller pile of data that included contract/testing transparency on anti-terrorism IT projects, for example. If the systems aren’t working, then disclosing them isn’t going to make them work any less well.
Not that anyone need fear transparency or failure to perform. The TSA has failed to perform for more than a decade now, failed to catch a single terrorist and it remains funded. Even when it starts groping children, passengers are so frightened that even that outrage passes without serious opposition.
Still, it would be easier to get people excited about mining government data if the data weren’t so random or marginal.