API

The Centers for Disease Control has spearheaded a program available to other agencies that automatically updates website content, making it easier and more cost-effective to keep information current.

The content syndication tool eliminates the cumbersome and time-consuming practice of emailing updates and changing website content manually. Keep reading →

Procurement is emerging as one of the most significant issues facing federal information technology leaders as the Obama administration begins its second term, a top ranking government IT official said this week.

More and more federal agencies are making the leap to cloud computing, adopting mobile technologies and developing APIs to share information. But agency IT leaders remain hampered from moving faster by contracting constraints that make it hard to make cross-agency buys, said Richard Spires, chief information officer for the Department of Homeland Security and vice chairman of the Federal CIO Council. Keep reading →

The U.S. Energy Information Administration, which collects, analyzes, and disseminates much of the nation’s independent energy information, is making its data available to the public through a new online service for the first time that will allow developers to capture and present electricity data on the web and through mobile applications.

The new application programming interface (API), will give developers access to data on electricity generation, retail sales, and average prices, and the types of fuel that are used to generate electricity at the state and national levels, according to EIA’s Mark Elbert. Electricity generation and fuel consumption data for individual power plants with more than 1 megawatt of capacity also are available. Keep reading →

“The liberation of government datasets is important in itself, but data are truly powerful when used in the development of informative apps.” So proclaimed Todd Park, Brian Forde and Jo Strang in a recent White House Blog, Safety Data Jam connects Tech Innovators with Public Safety Officers.


That safety jam was part of a broader initiative to challenge developers featuring new Data.gov Safety “data sets” that gained fresh exposure this month at the White House’s Safety Datapalooza.

I took a deeper look to see what innovation with government data is possible.

Keep reading →

The race to meet a series of milestones for advancing federal mobility continues to encounter differing expectations and the underlying need for better methods for managing data, according to a group of federal IT leaders in the throes of delivering the Obama Administration’s Digital Government Strategy.

In a White House report issued last month, Administration officials listed a variety of accomplishments in the first 90 days of a year-long set of initiatives, declaring “agencies are making great strides towards putting a solid foundation for a 21st Century Digital Government in place.” Keep reading →

The U.S. Census Bureau is putting real-time economic statistics into the hands of Americans via a new mobile application called “America’s Economy.”

The new application, released today, will provide constantly updated statistics on the U.S. economy, including monthly economic indicators, trends, along with a schedule of upcoming announcements, according to Census officials. Keep reading →


Though historically a place where ink meets paper, the Government Printing Office now produces nearly all of the country’s most important documents in digital form and is currently pursuing technologies to broaden its reach across agencies and to the public.

Chief Technology Officer Richard Davis said efforts are under way to migrate troves of digital information in the Federal Digital System created in 2006 to Extensible Markup Language (XML). The first of which was the fiscal 2013 budget released Monday via a collection of documents published by GPO. The rest of GPO’s data will migrate during fiscal 2012. The move will essentially allow users to use and pass on the information more easily and could eventually allow GPO to generate revenue through new digital products. Keep reading →