[Infowarrior] - Google Public Data

[Richard Forno]

Google Unveils New Tool To Dig for Public Data

By Kim Hart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 29, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/28/AR2009042802280_pf.html

Google launched a new search tool yesterday designed to help Web users  
find public data that is often buried in hard-to-navigate government  
Web sites.

The tool, called Google Public Data, is the latest in the company's  
efforts to make information from federal, state and local governments  
accessible to citizens. It's a goal that many Washington public  
interest groups and government watchdogs share with President Obama,  
whose technology advisers are pushing to open up federal data to the  
public.

The company plans to initially make available U.S. population and  
unemployment data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor  
Statistics, respectively. Other data sets, such as emissions  
statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency, will roll out in  
the coming months.

Google is one of a number of Internet properties, including Wikipedia  
and Amazon, that has been trying to make it easier to find government  
information on the Web.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has urged agencies to write their own  
"wikis," or self-edited entries, that can make government information  
and processes more accessible to the public. Amazon created an open  
data repository so developers and researchers can share data and  
collaborate on sifting through it. Google's Washington employees have  
spent the past two years visiting government agencies to urge them to  
make their Web sites, records and databases more searchable.

The E-Government Act of 2002 required government agencies to make  
information more accessible electronically, but users have complained  
that many agencies do not organize their Web sites so they can be  
easily indexed by search engines. And some agencies, Google has said,  
embed codes in their sites that make certain pages invisible to search  
engines.

"Information from government sources has been one of the thornier  
areas," said David Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, which  
includes the federal team. The new tool "is taking data, reformatting  
it so it's immediately consumable . . . so people don't have to go  
through rows and rows of data."

With Google's new tool, a Web user can search for a specific piece of  
data -- unemployment rates in Maryland, for example -- and a box  
appears at the top of the search results displaying the available  
relevant public data.

Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, a project within the Sunlight  
Foundation that uses technology to improve government transparency,  
said he's encouraged by Google's new tool, although he has not yet  
used it.

He cautioned, however, that there is no guarantee that government data  
is free of typographical and other errors.

He added that specific pieces of data could be misleading without a  
full understanding of how it fits with other information that may not  
be visible. For example, a Google searcher may not know enough about  
campaign contribution laws to spot inaccurate data entries or  
statistics.

Data tools should allow user feedback, Johnson said, to alert agencies  
to flawed data. Sunlight Labs is urging Federal Chief Information  
Officer Vivek Kundra to implement a feedback loop on Data.gov, a site  
he has proposed that would catalog public data.

"There's a lot to be wary about," Johnson said. "We don't live in a  
world free of typos."