The US governments new data.gov site (which we blogged about last month) is now live!

There are currently a selection of core datasets available – from information about World Copper Smelters to results from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. Raw data is available in XML, Text/CSV, KML/KMZ, Feeds, XLS, or ESRI Shapefile formats. As well as exploring and downloading the data that is available you can also suggest datasets that you’d like to be added!

From the site:

As a priority Open Government Initiative for President Obama’s administration, Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets. The data catalogs will continue to grow as datasets are added. Federal, Executive Branch data are included in the first version of Data.gov.

Data.gov is a major milestone in the Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative. To mark the occasion, Sunlight Labs, Google, O’Reilly Media, and TechWeb have launched Apps for America 2 – inviting proposals for open source mashups, visualisations or other innovative re-uses of material from data.gov.

You can watch a video of Vivek Kundra, the US’s CIO, talking about data.gov on YouTube.

Great news for open government data – and open data in general!

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