opengovernmentdataact
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Senate passes bill requiring easy access to public government data
Dreams of making government data easily accessible just came a little closer to reality. The US Senate has passed a defense authorization bill that includes the OPEN Government Data Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at making public data useful. The measure insists that any government agency info published on Data.gov must be made available in a "machine-readable" format (that is, your PC or phone knows what to do with it) and should be easily searched. To put it another way, the government can't just dump raw files and expect you to make sense of them.
New bill aims to turn open data idealism into US law
President Obama's administration has made significant progress in making US government data more transparent -- first with Data.gov, a repository for open data, and then with USASpending.gov, which tracks all of the government's spending. But despite those milestones, there's still plenty of room for improvement.
