Help regulations.gov to realize its potential! Standards are needed for the data that agencies send to regulations.gov: the public is not well-served by the mishmash of definitions that is a legacy of administration time pressures and cooperation obtained by allowing too many agency-specific definitions. For example:
- the “Abstract” item on regulations.gov “document details” pages (“Summary” might be a better word) is often not filled in, or contains something other than a summary. There should be a dependable place - that is, the same place for all agencies - where the public can find a short description of what aq document is about.
- even with full-text search, the standards for the information agencies supply to describe their documents (metadata standards) should be reviewed for regulations.gov as a whole, not just for individual agencies.
- agencies should have help and incentives to increase the accuracy of their data. A spelling error can frustrate a search. Straightforward changes like using standard drop-down menus for data entry would help.
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