Info 202 Fall 2011

Washington and other state governments
have made more and more government data accessible to citizens by digitizing. Since
there is a huge amount of data coming out almost everyday, the challenge is to
solve the data overload problems and make data manageable. Sunlight Labs is a
non-profit organization aims at creating new tools to organize open government
data sets and contextualize the information. Raw data without organization and
application are useless.

The abundance of open government data is
a great sign but the new challenge is how to classify and organize the data.
Sunlight Labs has been trying to sift the data and categorize them for
different use. For example, data from F.A.A. and weather information can be
used to predict flight delays. Another example is to organizing data by
visualizing them. Political conflicts data can be used to map out the
boundaries of conflicts rather than only geographical borders.

Open government data
are available to all types of citizens, including developers, students, and
journalists. Citizens can organize and use the open government data by building
web applications, web sites, or software.  Data are open and can be accessed anywhere as
long as the Internet is available. All data is open source so the barrier to
utilize the data is minimal. Everyone who has capabilities can be a contributor
to make the open gov data serve us better.

Article: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/more-tools-for-sifting-through-government-data/?scp=10&sq=organizing%20information&st=Search