As the American public and the Obama administration push the
government to post more public data online, federal agencies are
struggling with how to do so, and how to make that data available
in a form that's usable to the public and to third-party developers
who want to use the data for their own Web applications and
services.
Microsoft sees an opening and has introduced what it's calling
the Open Government Data Initiative, a program to help government
agencies host their data on Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Azure
cloud computing platform and make it available to developers via a
programmatic API.
Microsoft is releasing a free, open source software development
kit that gives agencies, or third parties with access to that data,
the tools they need to host their data in Azure and provide
programmatic interfaces to the data via REST. By default, OGDI
churns out data in the Atom format, which can be consumed in any
number of ways, including but not limited to .Net, Ruby, PHP, and
Python. OGDI can also handle geospatial data.
The company is also asking government agencies that don't want
to deal with the SDK to send their data sets to Microsoft?whether
by e-mail, FTP, or any other method?and Microsoft will then host
them directly.
A number of demonstration data sets are up on a reference beta site
for OGDI, including a number of data sets on Washington, D.C. (like
building permit and crime locations) and per diem spending rates
for the General Services Administration. If the data has associated
location data, Microsoft's beta site also shows how the government
data can be mapped onto a Live Map.
"I think the trend we are seeing is that government agencies,
especially with nonsensitive data, ... don't have the computing
capacity or power to host it internally nor the funding means to
support it," said Susie Adams, CTO of Microsoft's federal civilian
agency business, in an interview. OGDI, she implied, would offer a
cheaper place to store that data and a less development-intensive
way to give developers and the public access to that data.