Saturday, August 31, 2019

Data.gov

Any organization abandons some of the projects it begins. An organization the size of the United States government need not abandon a large proportion of its projects to leave many abandoned. Nor is there necessarily blame attached to leaving work undone, for events may have overtaken them. One hears of great quantities of materiel left behind at the end of WW II.

Some years back, the government decided that it would be an excellent idea to provide information freely on-line, the starting point to be https://data.gov. There is an astonishing volume of data there, of varying freshness and quality. My impression from a brief visit to the Department of Homeland Security's section is that it provides the data to map pretty much anything you'd like. The shape files probably do not include ones for every manhole cover and fire hydrant in the US, but on the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

On the other hand, there are traces of projects begun with hopes, then abandoned. The links on the Local Government section have dates in 2014 and 2015. Clicking on some of the links for Department of Labor's website brings up error pages stating that the linked server, ogesdw.dol.gov, does not exist. Then Friday many other links returned a server error message.

It would be wonderful if Data.gov had lived up to the hopes of five or six years ago. Much of it, though, is like a used bookstore run by someone who is overwhelmed--anything could be there, but one has no way to tell.



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