Princeton Researchers Say Feds Need Data Standard

dcblogs writes "The federal government's data-sharing efforts are a mess, and if Barack Obama really wants a useful 'Google for government,' he would have to set the government's vast amount of data free by exposing it and ensuring it complies to standards. Once that happens, commercial sites, aggregators, bloggers and everyone else will be able to access it, use it and transform it, argue a group of Princeton researchers (follow Download link for full PDF)."

Comments

Re:Add them to the buying spree.

[betterunixthanunix]

It is more a question of whether or not citizens will be able to access government data in a meaningful way. If the government wants to standardize its data, it can, assuming it contracts with a company that actually knows what it is doing (this is the real hitch). Government employees need to be able to continue doing what they normally do, and have the standardization happen automatically -- such as a MS .doc to ODF converter that silently makes the conversion whenever a file is saved, or another tool that automatically indexes files as they are saved. Such things already exist, it is just a matter of implementing on the scale of the government.