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Looks pretty reasonable, although for me personally the real question will be how good the data organization / searching / maintenance / provenance / exporting
by mjn 13y ago
Looks pretty reasonable, although for me personally the real question will be how good the data organization / searching / maintenance / provenance / exporting are. There are a number of open-data portals with a nice front page backed by a not-as-nice archive, and if you use it regularly that matters a lot more than the first impressions of a nice web design.
For example, the French government's open-data portal [1] has a pleasant interface and a nice search, but much of the data itself is miscellaneous files they've received from different departments or cities, not normalized into any kind of standard format. I can grudging overlook a lot of it being in Excel rather than some more portable data format like CSV, but much of it is even inside PDFs rather than available in a tabular format.
[1] http://www.data.gouv.fr http://www.data.gouv.fr
- vidarh 13y agoA lot of the time the first step to getting the data into decent formats is for more people to become aware that it is even available, though, so they can start asking for changes.
- jasonshen 13y agoAs a tech entrepreneur that got parachuted into the federal government a month ago as a Presidential Innovation Fellow - I will say that the people working on next.data.gov are really tech savvy and thinking hard about how to make this site as usable and accessible as possible both for developers and the general public.