I agree
Voting is Disabled

3 votes

I disagree

Rank3043

Idea#482

This idea is active.
Making Data More Accessible »

Government data enhancements (data.gov)

Why Is This Idea Important?: The Internet is an increasingly important tool for public discourse. More user friendly tools for individuals of all backgrounds will increase the quality of that discourse.

Data.gov should have a crawling program to identify data agencies make available (usually as CSVs) & use a standard page listing the field names. Commonly accessed data should have more in depth description of fields provided by the corresponding agency.

Widgets for blogs & other personal pages should be made to allow easy utilization of the data for casual or non-technical individuals. Simple functions could include line graphs, pie charts and YoY chart comparisons. More complex tools could join data from multiple sources such as budget numbers correlated with office incumbent time periods.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has a decent example in their "locking stubs" graphing feature. Choose a table to see what I'm talking about.

http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/

Google has an API with the kind of visualization features I'm referring to. Providing an online form to generate graphing code for a page/blog would be a big step.

http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/

Submitted by johnny5_13 2 years ago

Vote Activity Show

Comments (0)