Data.gov Squeezes Two Search Govs
June 9, 2009
What a battle of governmental initiatives. In one corner is the federating champ, USA.gov with its second Science.gov. In the other corner is the Data.gov contender. A citizen or other interested party can sit back and watch the political slug fest. Unlike a traditional kick boxing match, this one is going to rage for years with each round roughly the length of the Federal fiscal year.
Here’s a run down of the combatants:
- USA.gov (weighing in at about $22 million per year) with software implants from Microsoft and Vivisimo. The service (originally FirstGov.gov) has gained some Tyson like body mass without generating the type of online traffic one expects of a long reigning champ. USA.gov provides a “portal” to Federal information, and it is a bit like a blend of traditional search, a portal, and link farm. I use it but find the limit on documents accessible annoying. I rely on Google’s Uncle Sam service, but I am an addled goose looking for depth, not a partial results list or undisplayable images.
- Science.gov, supported by Deep Web Technologies, works in apparent harmony with USA.gov. Science.gov focuses on tech content, which I assumed would also be in the USA.gov index. With funds from different sources, Science.gov is a variant of USA.gov.
- Data.gov, supported by the White House, is a collection of data, not text. Next week (sometime after June 8), Data.gov gets an infusion of tens of thousands government data sets. You can read more about the expansion of the service in this PC World story, “U.S. Government Records Go Online in Volume” here.
I am not going to try and sort out individual agency Web sites, the Library of Congress, the Government Printing Office, and other assorted information repositories. I could not figure them out in Year 2000 when I dabbled in the FirstGov.gov planning activities. I sure as heck can’t make sense of them from Harrod’s Creek today.
The question in my mind is, “What citizen user knows where to look for US government information?” My solution, as noted, is Google, and I am curious about Wolfram Alpha’s appetite for these data. I wonder if the USDA Economic Research Service will be available? Lots of mystery and excitement surround this epic battle. I think every agency will win because the “silo method” is alive and well in the Federal government.
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3 Responses to “Data.gov Squeezes Two Search Govs”
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It will be interesting to see what happens with Data.gov vs. USA.gov.
Your article neglects to mention, however, that each of these only duplicates massive data discovery and delivery efforts within each department.
It’s sort of like those securities that get cut up and reshuffled and passed off as something new. Is anyone actually checking on the underlying data to make sure that it is any good?
I recently wrote a post where I deconstruct an actual dataset downloaded from Data.gov.
http://mazamascience.com/blog/?p=12
For those who want to USE data rather than just FIND it there is still a tremendous amount of work to do. Data.gov doesn’t change this fact.
Jonathan,
I’d argue that there is power in aggregation. Data.gov is causing a storm of interest among the developer community to participate in government by mashing up data. That’s a really important group of participants to get to active. For my part, I put up an ideas platform for people to submit and vote on the best app ideas that could be made this the data (http://bit.ly/datagov) and I also run Apps for Democracy in DC (http://www.appsfordemocracy.org)
Peter
http://twitter.com/corbett3000
There is no real competition between these 3 sites, much less a “slug fest.” Data.gov is beginning to provide access to large federal data sets, many of which are not particularly scientific. USA.gov has a small representative sample of federal science websites. Science.gov is the federated portal for federal science reports, an estimated 50 million pages of them, plus about 1600 technical website. It is the science workhorse. These three sites perform very different functions.