News

Feds Embrace Open Data

President Barack Obama signed an executive order establishing new standards and rules for open access to US government data. Along with this historic order, the Office of Management and Budget announced a new Open Data policy, spelling out changes in the government’s approach for how data is acquired and stored. The US government was once a model for how not to manage data. Private companies were often awarded contracts for massive government studies that would result in mounds of data acquired at taxpayer expense. But the tools for extracting and analyzing the data were proprietary and often maintained by the company itself; and anyone who wanted access had to pay a large service charge. Few standards existed, which compounded the labor cost for anyone who needed to extract the data for academic, personal, or entrepreneurial reasons.