Find info gold at data.gov
Inspection scores for the Glen Cove public housing projects. The number of railroad retirees living in each congressional district. The kinds of housing discrimination cases filed in Suffolk County.
A trove of data recently published online by the federal government can provide numbers like these, for those with access to the Internet and the ability to use a program such as Microsoft Excel.
As part of President Barack Obama's pledge to increase transparency in government, federal agencies were ordered to begin posting new data online by Jan. 22.
Agencies were to publish at least three data sets of "high value," which the administration described as "information that can be used to increase agency accountability and responsiveness [or] improve public knowledge of the agency and its operations."
Federal officials said 188 high-value data sets have been posted on data.gov. The site, launched in May with 47 data sets, now contains about 169,000 and has an average of 2,500 downloads a day, according to officials.
Obama also gave each agency 120 days from Dec. 8 to develop its own plan for open government to "improve transparency and integrate public participation and collaboration into its activities." Obama has said he wants to create "an unprecedented level of openness" in government.
Results are hit and miss
So far, one group tracking the initiative called it "somewhat successful" at making data available in more accessible formats.
Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group focused on the digitization of government data based in Washington, D.C., wrote in a blog posting that "plenty of data sets that had been available only as PDFs, or had to be pulled down by scraping Web sites, are now there for the taking."
However, only roughly a quarter of the data sets are actually new - not previously available in another format online, according to the group.
Some data had been available previously in a PDF format that couldn't be sorted or otherwise manipulated, for instance. Allison said, "The key going forward will be how agencies plan to comply with the rest of the directive and make more data available."
Several Sunlight employees looking at the data have also found initial problems such as broken links or files that are simply too large to manage easily.
In some cases, the user has to search on the agency site to find explanations to make sense of the data. Also, while useful for Web developers, raw data released in the XML format is not as easy or intuitive to use with popularly available software, the group said.
Mike Daconta, a former Long Islander who founded a tech firm in Vienna, Va., said the process has been too rushed and should have been better thought out.
He said he looked at one huge file in which "the column names don't make sense at all."Daconta added that the site should provide basic visualization functions, so a user could view charts, for example.
An evolving process
Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, said that as problems with the data are brought to the administration's attention, "our processes include working with agencies to correct and update their information on data.gov."
Eventually, the public may end up taking advantage of the information indirectly through third-party applications. For instance, Allison said, a developer could access the national tire quality standards data and create an application for a smartphone that a shopper could use while at a store: "You whip out your iPhone and check the tire rating using the App."
Using the data
At data.gov, the "high-value" federal agency data sets are organized into two catalogs. The "raw data" catalog provides users with an instant download in formats such as "comma-separated values," which can be imported into a database program. The "tools" catalog provides links to agency Web pages that allow a user to mine the data sets.
Here's how to use it
For instance, here's how you would get a list of federally declared disasters in Nassau County since 1964:
1. At data.gov, click on "Open Government Directive Agency Datasets'' on the right.
2. Next Under Department of Homeland Security, click on the "FEMA Disaster Declarations Summary" link.
3. On the right, under "Download Information,'' data is available in "XLS" format and can be opened in Excel.
A separate file must be downloaded to understand what each field represents.
The user can then sort according to state or county, or type of disaster (hurricane or West Nile virus).
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