Microsoft Offers Cloud-Based Public Data Hosting With AzureMicrosoft Offers Cloud-Based Public Data Hosting With Azure

As the American public and the Obama administration push the government to post more public data online, federal agencies are struggling with how to do so, and how to make that data available in a form that's usable to the public and to third-party developers who want to use the data for their own Web applications and services.

Microsoft sees an opening and has introduced what it's calling the Open Government Data Initiative, a program to help government agencies host their data on Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Azure cloud computing platform and make it available to developers via a programmatic API.

Microsoft is releasing a free, open source software development kit that gives agencies, or third parties with access to that data, the tools they need to host their data in Azure and provide programmatic interfaces to the data via REST. By default, OGDI churns out data in the Atom format, which can be consumed in any number of ways, including but not limited to .Net, Ruby, PHP, and Python. OGDI can also handle geospatial data.

The company is also asking government agencies that don't want to deal with the SDK to send their data sets to Microsoft -- whether by e-mail, FTP, or any other method -- and Microsoft will then host them directly.

A number of demonstration data sets are up on a reference beta site for OGDI, including a number of data sets on Washington, D.C. (like building permit and crime locations) and per diem spending rates for the General Services Administration. If the data has associated location data, Microsoft's beta site also shows how the government data can be mapped onto a Live Map.

"I think the trend we are seeing is that government agencies, especially with nonsensitive data, ... don't have the computing capacity or power to host it internally nor the funding means to support it," said Susie Adams, CTO of Microsoft's federal civilian agency business, in an interview. OGDI, she implied, would offer a cheaper place to store that data and a less development-intensive way to give developers and the public access to that data. Last month, federal CIO Vivek Kundra, in an interview with information, implied that he supported the use of public clouds to host and publish nonsensitive government data.

Amazon.com's Public Data Sets, announced late last year, allow the government and others to host public data on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud as Elastic Block Store components, and then integrate that data into Amazon-based applications as desired. Government agencies or other groups hosting that public data on Amazon could then use Amazon-based business intelligence or research tools to analyze those sets of data, paying for whatever compute and storage they require along the way.

Already, a number of public data sets are up on Amazon, including swine flu genome sequences, a dump of all the available procurement data on federal contracts from USASpending.gov, and anthropomorphic data on children.

Though Microsoft and Amazon have garnered some interest, Adams admitted the cloud won't necessarily be a fit for all government data, and said that any cloud hosting environment will ultimately have to be put on the GSA Schedule, passing rigorous security and other requirements along the way, to be a feasible place for the government to host its data.

Other new platforms are hoping to make better sense of government data, if not hosting it on their own sites. For example, Google Public Data, launched late last month, answers search queries with usable forms of publicly available data, like putting unemployment data in a timeline graph for the search "Maryland unemployment rate."

A new search engine called Wolfram Alpha will be focused exclusively on organizing data, including government-created data. Others digging deep into government data in their own way include independent organizations like the Sunlight Foundation.

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