Slashdot Mirror
Congress Approves Act that Opens US Government Data To the Public; Requires Federal Agencies To Publish 'Non-Sensitive' Info in 'Machine-Readable' Format (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Congress has passed a bill that could make it easier for you to access public data released by the government. The House approved the OPEN Government Data Act on Saturday, while all eyes were on the shutdown, as part of a larger bill to support evidence-based policymaking. It requires that federal agencies must publish any "non-sensitive" info in a "machine-readable" format (essentially in a way that's legible on your smartphone or laptop). The act also insists that agencies appoint a chief data officer to oversee all open data efforts. Having passed the Senate last Wednesday, the bill is next headed to the President's desk.
When the Republicans took office, one of the first things the thugs did was remove all of the EPA's climate data from the internet. The EPA had massive volumes of data accessible to anyone, and Republican thugs removed it all. Immediately.
Does this new law require them to put it all back?
A lot of government sites currently publish data that can be easily downloaded, but the average user has trouble making sense of it. For example, the city of Chicago has a website where you can download crime data https://data.cityofchicago.org... for the last 18 years. You can pick from formats like CSV or XML (but they don't have Json yet) to download. Their website visualization tools are getting better, but I wish they were much more flexible.
I am building an analytic tool that makes it really easy to create relational tables from CSV or Json files and do all kinds of analytics using it. See a quick 4 minute demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... to see a few things we can do with that Chicago data. It is just as easy to do similar things against any data you can download. In this instance, trying to load the 6.5 million row table into Excel is not very practical.