Late last week the Obama Administration announced the release of almost 300 data sets on Data.gov. You can browse through them at http://www.data.gov/ogd/.
This page lists two tabs: one for raw data sets and one for a tool catalog. The raw data sets are listed by department, from the Department of Agriculture to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Each data set listing includes a brief description, rating if available (most of the data sets don’t have listings), agency/subagency name, and category. The tools include same information and sorting.
The raw data sets are interesting if you’re into development or crunching of various sorts (number, text, etc.) Let’s take for example the FEMA Disaster Declarations Summary. You can download the raw data in several different formats, in this case including XLS, XML, CSV/TXT, KML/KMZ, and Shapefile. There’s a summary of data information including description, release date, and time period, a ratings section, keywords and agency information, and a pointer to documentation for the dataset. The kind of data available runs the gamut from straightforward (“U.S. Government recreation sites and facilities”) to somewhat more niche (“Prescribed Fires and Acres from 1998 to 2008 by Agency.”)
If you’re not a developer you’ll probably find the tools tab more interesting. These tools are not all new, but you may not know about all of them. There’s nutrition information on 1,000 commonly-eaten foods, a database of patents resulting from Department of Energy sponsored research, a tool to get custom image maps of planets and satellites, and what I would describe (I’m not sure it’s the correct description, but I’d describe it this way) as an API to get the delay status of airports.
I wish there were other ways to sort this data — by rating, for example, or category — and I looked for or couldn’t find an RSS feed for updates on the latest data collections (did I miss it?) It’s a great idea to become more transparent; a tool to keep the public posted on how transparent the government is becoming would be just as handy.
A hat tip to ResourceShelf to the pointer about Richard Graham, who has put together a digital collection of comics created/commissioned by the government. There are over 180 comics available in the collection which is located at http://contentdm.unl.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fcomics.
The comics are presented in a gallery of twenty to a page, with titles and thumbnails. Most of them are in English though I did see a few in Spanish and other languages. The topics range from the mail to nutrition to drugs to the military. (“Lil’ Abner Joins the Navy!”) There are comics available for the 1940s on up, and in some cases the comics have popular mainstream characters (including Wee Pals, Peanuts, and Dennis the Menace.)
Clicking on an issue provides information like subject, description, artist, date, and and keywords. But the very best part is that if you go to the detail page (I recommend Security is an Eye Patch, starting Charlie Brown and sister Sally) and click on the thumbnail of the comic’s cover, you can download the entire comic as a PDF.
I love this collection. It’s so random. The comics range from serious to kind of silly to intensely weird. Supergirl wants you to wear your seat belt. A 1973 army pamphlet on troubleshooting equipment in combat units. A 1954 comic book on the wonders of Wyoming. And if you’re at all interested in underground comics, don’t miss “Consumer Comix”, a 1975 comic book on consumer protection brought to you by the Wisconsin Department of Justice. I really hope that R. Crumb got to read that one.
The PDF downloads are sometimes a bit slow, but it’s well worth it. Enjoy!
The White House blog isn’t the most gripping read in the world (I think my favorite government blog is either Gov Gab or the Library of Congress blog) but you can get some good announcements on there now and again. I was reading it on Monday and noticed a rather interesting post from the head of the FCC, Julius Genachowski.
The blog proposed two new rules for the FCC. The first was a clear position in favor of network neutrality — “broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications.” (There are exceptions made for spam, malware sites, and unlawful material.) The second is to support the first, “broadband providers must be transparent about their network management practices.” While these sound like reasonable proposals, and I’m glad to see the government taking a position on this, I’m annoyed that it’s taken so long; Net Neutrality has been a controversial issue for a while now.
In addition to this statement of network neutrality support, the government has a new Web site: OpenInternet.gov. Surprise! It’s in beta. The site doesn’t contain a lot at the moment, but here are some of the highlights:
There’s a speech from Mr. Genachowski about his vision of the Internet as an useful and enduring institution. There’s a place that you can sign up for e-mail alerts from the FCC. And there’s a video of the speech by Mr. Genachowski. But that is not the fascinating part of the site to me.
The fascinating part of the site to me is the forum that’s underneath the video of the site. It’s a pretty basic forum — huge numbers of threaded posts in a big file — but the discussion is excellent. There are plenty of Yay! posts but also many “Hey this is a bad idea” posts. Brett Glass contributes a lot to the discussion. I hadn’t heard from Brett in YEARS … he used to write a … column? for a magazine I read back in the early 90s. I want to say Communications Week but I’m not sure. There were so many industry magazines back then.
The thing this discussion really does is is make it clear how complicated this issue actually is. Network neutrality is a good idea. But what about inappropriate material that’s not clearly defined by law? What about those applications and sites, not even invented yet, that take up so much bandwidth that they endanger the bandwidth of other customers at an ISP? Who’s going to make sure an ISP’s network management practices are actually transparent?
Now that the FCC has taken a position, these discussions had been had. I look forward to seeing them. I just hope that a) the forum is a little easier to peruse than what’s available on OpenInternet.gov and b) OpenInternet.gov gets its own RSS feed (sigh…)
