From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dawn Vogler
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 11:06 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [slm] FW: Google Unveils New Tool to dig for public data
Google Unveils New Tool To Dig for Public Data
By Kim Hart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Google launched a new search tool yesterday designed to help Web
users find public data that is often buried in hard-to-navigate
government Web sites.
The tool, called Google Public Data, is the latest in the
company's efforts to make information from federal, state and local
governments accessible to citizens. It's a goal that many Washington
public interest groups and government watchdogs share with President
Obama, whose technology advisers are pushing to open up federal data to
the public.
The company plans to initially make available U.S. population
and unemployment data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, respectively. Other data sets, such as emissions statistics
from the Environmental Protection Agency, will roll out in the coming
months.
Google is one of a number of Internet properties, including
Wikipedia and Amazon, that has been trying to make it easier to find
government information on the Web.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has urged agencies to write their
own "wikis," or self-edited entries, that can make government
information and processes more accessible to the public. Amazon created
an open data repository so developers and researchers can share data and
collaborate on sifting through it. Google's Washington employees have
spent the past two years visiting government agencies to urge them to
make their Web sites, records and databases more searchable.
The E-Government Act of 2002 required government agencies to
make information more accessible electronically, but users have
complained that many agencies do not organize their Web sites so they
can be easily indexed by search engines. And some agencies, Google has
said, embed codes in their sites that make certain pages invisible to
search engines.
"Information from government sources has been one of the
thornier areas," said David Girouard, president of Google Enterprise,
which includes the federal team. The new tool "is taking data,
reformatting it so it's immediately consumable . . . so people don't
have to go through rows and rows of data."
With Google's new tool, a Web user can search for a specific
piece of data -- unemployment rates in Maryland, for example -- and a
box appears at the top of the search results displaying the available
relevant public data.
Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, a project within the
Sunlight Foundation that uses technology to improve government
transparency, said he's encouraged by Google's new tool, although he has
not yet used it.
He cautioned, however, that there is no guarantee that
government data is free of typographical and other errors.
He added that specific pieces of data could be misleading
without a full understanding of how it fits with other information that
may not be visible. For example, a Google searcher may not know enough
about campaign contribution laws to spot inaccurate data entries or
statistics.
Data tools should allow user feedback, Johnson said, to alert
agencies to flawed data. Sunlight Labs is urging Federal Chief
Information Officer Vivek Kundra to implement a feedback loop on
Data.gov, a site he has proposed that would catalog public data.
"There's a lot to be wary about," Johnson said. "We don't live
in a world free of typos."
