I came across an interesting opinion piece by Steve Bratt entitled Why the U.S. Should Stand Behind its Commitment to Open Government Data. In the piece he talked about the government’s role in supporting websites that provide access to valuable, but not sensitive government data. I had never heard of data.gov, but was surprised to learn that it currently makes ~300,000 data sets available to the public so they can easily find, download, and use data sets that are generated and held by the federal government.
The challenges facing those championing the data.gov site, which are covered by Mr. Bratt in his opinion piece, are similar to those that my team faces each day — How do you quantify the value of data to non-analysts? How do you make the benefit of having access to that data tangible?
