WSJ: Public Data…at Your Fingertips

Federal and state governments are a trove of information. Now a lot of it is just an app away.

Joel Schectman, The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2013

Most government data have been available to the public for decades. But trying to find information quickly and in a useful format has been another story altogether.


All that is starting to change. A growing open-government movement has pushed successfully for state and federal data to be made more readily available online, in user-friendly formats. And the federal government has begun to release its data in a digital format that allows software engineers to more easily use it to develop interactive applications. App developers are now mixing and matching government data to help consumers, businesses and researchers harvest new insights.

Here's a closer look at some of these apps and websites.

Labor and Health Violations

DATA: Records of labor-law and health-and-safety violations for hotels, restaurants and shops
SOURCES:U.S. Labor Department; Occupational Safety and Health Administration
DESCRIPTION: The Eat Shop Sleep app by Rachel Moore maps health and labor-law violations by restaurants, hotels and shops, and combines that information with Yelp reviews. Now you can find out that the hamburger joint down the street owes employees $5,653 in back wages—but the sweet-potato fries are supposed to be divine.

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Salaries

DATA: Average salaries for hundreds of jobs listed by state
SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
DESCRIPTION: Aequitas, an app from Fuzion Applications Inc., gathers salary data for more than 800 occupations from all around the U.S. Job seekers can see the range of salaries in any area and find out what they might command in, say, Nevada versus Illinois.

Business-Owner Addresses

DATA: Addresses of business-license holders
SOURCES: City authorities
DESCRIPTION: The Your Mapper app from Metro Mapper LLC shows information for business-license holders in Chicago; Portland, Ore.; and Louisville, Ky., on city maps. Salespeople can use it to target potential customers.

Hospital Records

DATA: Hospital safety records and quality indicators; patient surveys
SOURCE:U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
DESCRIPTION: Hospital Quality, an app from MicroStrategy Inc., combines hospital safety and quality scores with patient-satisfaction scores gathered by CMS and uses the data to rank hospitals.

Flu Incidence

DATA: Weekly state influenza levels; crowdsourced reports
SOURCES:U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Foursquare

DESCRIPTION: The Flusquare app from Floodlight Software LLC updates users on flu levels in their states and asks them to indicate when they may be sick.
If a user who also has downloaded the Foursquare app indicates enough symptoms to suggest he has the flu, the app then pulls his recent location data from Foursquare to find out where he visited when he was contagious. The app then warns other Flusquare users who were in his vicinity at that time to watch for symptoms.

Energy Prices

DATA: Consumption and price information for electricity and fossil fuels; power plants' fuel use
SOURCE:U.S. Energy Information Administration
DESCRIPTION: EIA's Electricity Data Browser (at eia.gov/electricity/data/browser ) collects nationwide data on power consumption and prices for the past decade, helping companies project future energy costs. Plant-level data reveals what fuel types are used, allowing companies interested in reducing their carbon footprints to estimate the environmental impact of operating in one location versus another.

What's Offshore

DATA: Locations of offshore oil and gas platforms; traffic patterns of marine vessels and locations of shipwrecks; offshore areas designated for wind energy and protected wildlife areas
SOURCES: Include U.S. Defense Department; Bureau of Ocean Energy Management; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Description: MarineCadastre.gov pulls data from 16 government and nonprofit sources into an interactive online map of U.S. oceans. It is primarily intended to help developers of wind and wave energy, but it also can be used by fishing and drilling companies.

Where the Sun Shines

DATA: Average annual global horizontal irradiance; photovoltaic plant locations; transmission line locations
SOURCES: Include National Renewable Energy Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory; U.S. Interior Department
DESCRIPTION: Designed to help developers find sites for large solar power plants, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Solar Prospector (at maps.nrel.gov/prospector) pulls data on sunlight patterns, routes of transmission lines and locations of existing power plants into a single interactive map.

USDA

Food and Fitness

DATA: Americans' access and proximity to grocery stores; obesity rates; diabetes rates; physical fitness levels; proximity to fast food
SOURCE:U.S. Department of Agriculture
DESCRIPTION: The USDA's Food Environment Atlas (at ers.usda.gov) pulls food, health and socioeconomic data into various maps, allowing researchers to search for correlations between the availability of healthy food and obesity-related illnesses like diabetes. The maps also allow food-service companies to look for possible sites to expand.

National Nanotechnology Initiative

Nanotechnology

DATA: Nationwide locations of nanotechnology facilities, initiatives and degree programs
SOURCE:National Nanotechnology Initiative
DESCRIPTION: The Nanotechnology Resource Map (at nano.gov) shows the location of degree programs, facilities and research-and-development projects in the field of nanotechnology, giving businesses, investors and students interested in the technology a comprehensive overview of what's out there.
Mr. Schectman is a Wall Street Journal reporter in New York. He can be reached at joel.schectman@wsj.com.

Making Dollars and Sense of the Open Data Economy

Is the push to free up government data resulting in economic activity and startup creation?

Alex Howard, O'Reilly Radar, December 11, 2012

Over the past several years, I’ve been writing about how government data is moving into the marketplaces, underpinning ideas, products and services. Open government data and application programming interfaces to distribute it, more commonly known as APIs, increasingly look like fundamental public infrastructure for digital government in the 21st century.

What I’m looking for now is more examples of startups and businesses that have been created using open data or that would not be able to continue operations without it. If big data is a strategic resource, it’s important to understand how and where organizations are using it for public good, civic utility and economic benefit.

Sometimes government data has been proactively released, like the federal government’s work to revolutionize the health care industry by making health data as useful as weather data or New York City’s approach to becoming a data platform.

In other cases, startups like Panjiva or BrightScope have liberated government data through Freedom of Information Act requests and automated means. By doing so, they’ve helped the American people and global customers understand the supply chain, the fees associated with 401(k) plans and the history of financial advisors.

I’ve hypothesized that open data will have an overall effect on the economy akin to that of open source and small business. Gartner’s research has posited that open data creates value in the public and private sector. If government acts as a platform to enable people inside and outside government to innovate on top of it, what are the outcomes?

Over the past four years, the world has heard a rising chorus for raw data from voices like the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, and the chief technology officer of the United States, Todd Park. Park, in particular, has been working to scale open data across the federal government as the nation’s “entrepreneur in residence.”

McKinsey and Associates estimated the annual economic value of big, open liquid health data at some $350 billion annually. While that number is eye-opening, which companies and startups stand to change health care using open health data?

Some examples are clear, from mobile apps like iTriage (now owned by Aetna) to Castlight, but they aren’t sufficient to understand what’s happening out there.

Other promising startups are in the consumer finance space, where so-called “smart disclosure” initiatives are enabling people to put their personal data to use. Startups like Billshrink.com and Hello Wallet now are enabling people to make smarter financial decisions.

I know there are more stories out there, and in sectors beyond health care and consumer finance — including transit, energy, education and media. Over the next several months, I’ll be identifying and profiling more civic startups, such as those from the first class in the Code for America accelerator, like Captricity, to specialized search engines, like Zillow, Panjiva and DataMarket.

In the course of that work, I hope to answer some big questions. What are the sustainable business models that successful civic startups are using, whether they use legislative data or other reuse of public sector information?  What are the real costs associated with opening up government data to make it usable, both for government and entrepreneurs? And how does it balance against what datasets, at the federal, state or local levels, are the most valuable? Are they open and usable? If so, who’s using them and to what effect? If not, why not?

At the end of this particular project, in February, we’ll publish a report on what I’ve found. In it, I hope to be able to share some answers to several core questions on the topic. Where I need your help is in identifying new startups that are using or consuming government data or in highlighting how existing companies use it in their operations, good or services. Who is doing the most interesting work — and where? If you have research and evidence to share on the questions I posed above, feel free to ring in on that count as well.

Please weigh in through the comments or drop me a line at alex@oreilly.com or at @digiphile on Twitter.