Catalogs showing databases the federal government collects and tracks are being published this week, thanks to the efforts of a transparency advocacy group, but at least 10 agencies still need to comply, following the recently added indexes of the General Services Administration and the Small Business Association.
The indexes, called Enterprise Data Inventories, are slowly being put online as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Sunlight Foundation.
“Access to this data will empower journalists, government officials, civic technologists, innovators and the public to better hold government accountable,” said Sunlight Foundation President Chris Gates in a statement. “Previously, it was next to impossible to know what and how much data the government has, and this is an unprecedented window into its internal workings.”
The indexes are still a work in progress and agencies must post updates each quarter.
Even the data not publicly released can be revealing and reflects “the extraordinary complexity of government,” the foundation said in a post.
The Sunlight Foundation pointed to a few significant findings, such as a Department of Transportation dataset that tracks truck and bus accidents and a dataset that most likely tracks the Office of Personnel Management’s outreach to Congress.
Also, the watchdog noted that the Department of Defense has not cataloged any non-public or restricted datasets, reflecting, the foundation hopes, the agency’s focus on publishable data rather than its noncompliance.
“[The Office of Management and Budget’s] unprecedented answer to Sunlight’s FOIA shows an extraordinary amount of transparency and represents a true commitment to open data,” the Sunlight Foundation said. “We will work to make sure their continued enforcement of open data mandates is similarly zealous and successful.”
The indexes were created as part of an executive order by President Obama in 2013 to make government data more transparent.
Though the inventories don’t reveal the contents of the datasets that aren’t already public, they can be a powerful tool for journalists and other interested parties simply by acknowledging non-public data’s existence. It will help entities craft new and more specific FOIA requests for information they know the government has.
The files are being published in JSON format, which is geared towards web programmers. The Sunlight Foundation provided tips for parties interested in accessing the data directly.
