Government Asks For More Input On Data.govGovernment Asks For More Input On Data.gov

With the government data site Data.gov growing quickly, the Office of Management and Budget is seeking input into how to make the trove of information more useful.

Last week, the Obama administration finished up an online brainstorming period for its transparency and open government initiative. Some of the public suggestions that poured in dealt directly with Data.gov.

Among citizen recommendations received: setting clear agency targets for posting data and showing progress toward those targets, adopting data dictionaries to make sure the public understands terms that differ across agencies, and staying current with new technologies such as RSS feeds to spread data.

Other recommendations included making the National Archives and Records Administration the place for electronic data backup, waiving copyrights of contributed data, adopting better search and discovery tools, and digitizing all government research reports.

In a blog post Monday, federal CIO Vivek Kundra asked citizens to discuss more specific ideas about how to improve Data.gov, including methods for contributing and rating data sets to Data.gov, targets for publication of data, and what kind of applications and data sets would be best to build for and add to Data.gov.

By the end of this week, Kundra expects Data.gov to contain more than 100,000 data feeds. The site continues to grow quickly; Kundra said last month that he expected 240,000 feeds by the end of June. More features, such as tagging and new applications, are due over the next few months.

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