The U.S. government plans to make more than 100,000 data sources available by the end of next week on its data.gov site, in what may be the real start of government's effort to share its vast database with the world.
Data.gov has been open for business for about two weeks but with fewer than 100 data sources available it's now just a teaser of a site.
Data.gov is cataloging data and presenting it in standard formats, such as CVS or XLS, or Keyhole Markup Language (KML) used in Google Earth and XML, among others. In many cases, agencies will develop widgets and other tools make the data accessible and interesting. A simple example is the FBI's Top Ten Wanted widget.
Sadly, I don't see any plan to place historic documents of interest to genealogists online. You can read more in an article by Patrick Thibodeau in Computerworld at http://www.pcworld.com/article/166262/government_records_go_online.html?tk=rss_news.
My thanks to Donald Gradeless for telling me about the new site.
100,000 data sources in a week? WOW! They must have every government employee working on that. If even a tiny fraction of 1% of those "data sources" has to do with genealogy, us amatuer genealogists will be thrilled!
Posted by: Larry Parker | June 08, 2009 at 09:21 PM
Perhaps it will raise public interest in our nation's history and legacy. The more our people learn about the greatness of the USA, the better our citizens become. Let us preserve this "grand experiment" -- it succeeded for over 200 years.
Happy Dae·
http://ShoeStringGenealogy.com
Posted by: Dae Powell | June 09, 2009 at 12:41 PM
The company I work for is also doing this type of work, but this is really a lot of work...
Hope we will doing this kind of big projects too in the future.
Bye!
http://www.governmentrecordsreview.com
Posted by: Chris King | July 08, 2009 at 04:14 PM