Government Data Goes Public

When the real estate sites Trulia and Zillow both made initial public offerings this summer it was more than just a victory for the two companies, federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said Tuesday. It was also a victory for the government data that underlies those two sites, he said during a keynote presentation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s cloud computing and big data forum and workshop.

Much of the excitement about so-called big data in government has focused on ways federal agencies can use powerful new data analysis tools to gather information about national security threats or to spot fraud in Medicare and contract spending. VanRoekel’s office has also been working, though, on the role government-gathered data -- aggregated into machine readable streams on the website Data.gov and elsewhere -- can play in the emerging information economy...