...Last month, the folks in Mountain View made an announcement that offered more insight into the Public Sector initiative, which focuses on working with various U.S. government agencies to make federal, state and local public data more accessible to its citizens, and is also likely to shake up the online reputation management world.
The first state governments that Google will partner with include Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia, and the charge is to increase the crawlability of their respective Web sites and invisible databases for all major search engines - not just Google - via the Sitemaps.org protocol....
In effect, Google’s efforts will result in the wider broadcasting of public data into the results pages of the major search engines, representing one of the biggest steps in the accessibility and distribution of pubic information since governments began making data accessible on Web sites.
J.L. Needham, manager of the Public Sector initiative, elaborated on the types of data the company is looking for: “Google is not seeking to make any specific type of information in a public government database accessible to search engine users — we’re intent on making all such information accessible,” said Needham. “So, this includes property records, court records, reports from a department of education on school performance, a health department’s licensing records from medical practitioners, RFPs from a housing authority, a workforce services agency’s job postings service, and on down [the] list of the dozens of governmental information services. If it’s public information and not in a search engine, it’s the target of Google’s initiative.”
Needham also pointed out that Google is only seeking data intended by the government to be truly public....
The implications are tremendous on a variety of fronts, including the potential for access to previously obscured databases, increased transparency of government data, and the provision of stiff competition from search engines to companies that profit from fee-based public data access. There is also potential for citizens to collaboratively assist the government in helping to scrub incorrect information, or remove data that is not intended to be public, such as Social Security numbers....
As Needham also said, “We should expect all information made public by our government to be truly public, which means accessibility through search engines.” ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/22/2007 10:47:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
