The push to make federal government data more open has yielded a range of benefits to federal agencies along with the public, OMB has said in a retrospective of the administration’s efforts in that area.
“Since 2009, the administration has made significant progress opening up data sets that have never before been public, and creating new pathways to civic engagement,” an OMB announcement said.
“Communities can map demographic, income, and school data to promote Fair Housing. Patients can find information on the safety and cost of hospitals, nursing homes, and physicians, empowering them to make smarter health care choices. These diverse tools benefit different groups of people, industries, and communities, yet all rely on one thing: open data,” it said.
Agencies have released more than 200,000 datasets, it said, pointing to initiatives including the launch of data.gov and the associated standards for open data now used by the government and others; an executive order making open and machine-readable data the new default for government information, making it more readily available and useful; Project Open Data, designed to share best practices and software code to assist federal agencies with opening data; the Federal IT Dashboard to give insight into how the government spends its IT investments; and the 2014 DATA Act, designed to make overall federal spending more transparent.
