Comments on: Data.gov Squeezes Two Search Govs

By: David Wojick

David Wojick — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:39:59 +0000

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.

By: Peter Corbett

Peter Corbett — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:48:20 +0000

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

By: Jonathan Callahan

Jonathan Callahan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:45:29 +0000

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.