US Opens Up All Sorts Of Gov't Documents
from the this-is-good-news dept
While we've been disappointed by some moves by the Obama administration (on copyright, federal shield law, civil liberties, warrantless wiretapping, etc.), one area where the administration has made really big strides is on opening up formerly locked up gov't information. The latest is that the Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register have just opened up the "Official Journals of Government" -- a document that used to cost a mere $17,000/year and is now available for free, online -- and made the Federal Register (basically the list of what the federal gov't is doing every day) XML enabled, so that anyone can do cool stuff with it. Ed Felten's team at Princeton has already created FedThread, which let you not only search the Register, but also annotate and create customized feeds. This is really great...
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Filed Under: data, federal register, open, transparency, us gov't, xml
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An interesting note:
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I can see how comments / discussion on the fedthread could be exponentially more useful than the raw data, too bad no one's started yet and it's all really boring to read.
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More info for your reading pleasure
"I gathered questions from a variety of sources, including on-line discussion groups and twitter, and have been doing email back and forth with both Ray and Mike. Hope this is useful (it certainly has been fun to do)!"
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boingboing link broken
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