I love that the government is making a concerted effort to make more of its data available. I wonder if they'll make anything available through APIs. If data is going to be centralized and all put on data.gov I would love to see a simple REST API to allow us citizens to put that data to work in new and exciting ways. The number of ways you could mashup or repurpose that kind of information is exciting. By developing an API the government could also receive a needed boost from developers who build new applications that use the information.
REST APIs are not the gatekeepers to transparency: data with guaranteed access and any predictable format works fine, for many data sets.
Pretend they release the salary survey results in one big, gigantic text file broken down by county and updated yearly. If you wanted to figure out what the average salary of teachers was nationwide, rather than waiting for the government to implement average_salary_by_occupational_class you could just download the entire freaking thing and calculate it. And since you can download the entire freaking thing, nothing prevents you from exposing any API you care to give it. Make it RESTful, make it Big Freaking Java Enterprise XML, put it on an iPhone app responding only to telnet commands written in lolcat, whatever you want.
I've got a project on the back back burner which would benefit great from doing exactly that. (Downloading and exposing an API, not writing in lolcat.) If data.gov gives commercially interesting things I'd publish APIs to my slicing of it just for the PR benefit, since APIs are essentially just a no-marginal-cost industrial biproduct of my own need for the data.
(The engineering resources to develop APIs are no marginal cost. Accessing the API is a marginal cost, but I anticipate it being so low that it isn't worth me worrying about. If it gets to be a problem I'll rate limit it and OSS the scraper code.)
I think this is great news for startups. With the availability of this public data there will be plenty of innovation in the consumer space. You can start thinking about a host of services, increasing accessibility of information in health, travel and other areas.
Looking forward to which Cloud based company/startup takes a fore front in this. @nategraves has a great point about APIs, would def. love to see a few of those and the applications that result from the sheer volume of data. Great initiative.
www.USGovXML.com is an index of publically available web services and XML data sources provided by the US government. It includes detailed descriptions of the data sources and their operations. Links to the host systems for documentation, tech support, etc. are also available. Source code snippets are provided to help developers better understand how to use the data sources. Web based applets, for use by mobile devices (i.e. SmartPhones), have also been provided. The mobile applets are available at www.USGovXML.com/mobile.
I think this will be a good way to create new jobs, and I am not sure if Obama really means it to be included in his 3.5 Millions jobs plan or not.
For example, even if Data.gov won't create API - which is less likely to happen -, I will create an API for Data.gov, and I will make a business model around it, and hire some programmers with me.
I have created API for Yahoo! Music videos long time ago before Yahoo! thinks of creating it's current music API. :)
APIs and making data accessable to others, and organizing the data and even mixing it like a mashup, is something that will help people for sure.
