{"id":521,"date":"2009-05-23T13:05:56","date_gmt":"2009-05-23T19:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/000521"},"modified":"2009-05-23T19:30:23","modified_gmt":"2009-05-24T01:30:23","slug":"datagov-freely-accessible-data-in-standard-formats-from-the-usa-federal-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/521","title":{"rendered":"Data.gov&#8211;freely accessible data in standard formats from the USA federal government"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever wondered where the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.data.gov\/details\/16\">world&#8217;s copper smelters are<\/a>?\u00a0 Or pondered <a href=\"http:\/\/www.data.gov\/details\/37\">reservoir storage data for the Colorado river<\/a>?\u00a0 Had questions about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.data.gov\/details\/59\">residential energy use of US households<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>Now you can find the answers to these questions, using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.data.gov\">data.gov<\/a>, the stated purpose of which is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.data.gov\/about\">&#8220;to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.&#8221;<\/a>\u00a0 I&#8217;ve been writing for a while about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/000096\">publishing power of the internet<\/a>, but data.gov takes this to a whole new level.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s definitely a starting point, not an end, as there are only 47 raw datasets that you can access.\u00a0 They cover a wide range of data and agencies, and were apparently chosen to kick things off because they <a href=\"http:\/\/www.data.gov\/faq\">&#8220;already enjoy a high degree of consensus around definitions, are in formats that are readily usable, include the availability of metadata, and provide support for machine-to-machine data transfer.&#8221;<\/a>\u00a0 The four main formats for data provided by data.gov are XML, CSV, KML and ESRI.\u00a0 (There are also a number of widgets, and tools you can use, including the <a href=\"http:\/\/factfinder.census.gov\/home\/saff\/main.html?_lang=en\">census factfinder<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"http:\/\/www.data.gov\/suggestdataset\">datasets can be requested<\/a>, and I&#8217;m hoping that they will be rolled out soon.\u00a0 What a playground! Go take a look!<\/p>\n<p><em>Update, 4:55: Here&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/howto.wired.com\/wiki\/Open_Up_Government_Data\">great article on the whole process and problem<\/a>.<\/em><br \/>\n[tags]data.gov,public data[\/tags]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever wondered where the world&#8217;s copper smelters are?\u00a0 Or pondered reservoir storage data for the Colorado river?\u00a0 Had questions about the residential energy use of US households? Now [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,29,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-databases","category-gis","category-useful-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}