Open data meets government data

There's no shortage of data generated by modern-day governments. But even when that data is accessible to the public, it has rarely been in a format that is useful to researchers without laborious conversion or even data entry.

With the open data, citizen developer, and citizen scientist movements growing, all that is changing. The Open Government Data Initiative is an example of this trend. Led by Microsoft, the initiative uses the Azure cloud computing platform and the OGDI open source starter kit to publish a wide variety of public data. A variety of city and national US data sets are available on the OGDI portal. Other governments, such as the Canadian city of Edmonton, have leveraged the code to publish their data on their own website.

This sort of data is invaluable to researchers doing a wide variety of social science research and to journalists wishing to do computer-assisted reporting.

Learn more at the OGDI website.