Sorting Through the Government Data Explosion

In May 2009, the Obama administration started putting raw government data on the Web. It started with 47 data sets. Today, there are more than 270,000 government data sets, spanning every imaginable category from public health to foreign aid.

This was all done in the name of openness, transparency and allowing citizens to tinker with the government's data assets for themselves in the pursuit of knowledge, insights and even profit. In a recent interview, Vivek Kundra, chief information officer of the United States, explained, "We want people to benefit from the data we're democratizing." Over the next few years, he predicted, a "new industry in data curation will be born." The White House official pointed to James Hendler, a computer scientist, and his team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a leading group of data curators.