Do we need a National Data Agency?

Robert Kosara of EagerEyes.org lauds Obama’s promises of more open government but says he needs to do more:

All these great developments notwithstanding, there is still a piece of the puzzle missing: the numbers. This president, more than many (or all) before him, makes his decisions based on numbers. These numbers need to be published and made accessible so we can understand the decisions and make our own.

The challenge is not only data availability. A lot of data is, in fact, available. The US is the most transparent nation in the world – to an extent that can be frightening to an outsider (think pay data for state employees, property tax data, etc.).

The challenge is that a lot of data is published in a format that is human-readable, not machine-readable. This might sound like a good thing, but it's not. Machine-readable data can be processed and transformed into any number of human-readable forms, that direction is trivial. Making human-readable data accessible to a machine is much more difficult, error-prone, and expensive.

What we need is a National Data Agency (NDA). This agency would be tasked with collecting data that all other agencies collect and produce, and making it available in a central place and in electronic, machine-readable form. There could and should be a reasonable data presentation on its website, perhaps even a National Data Dashboard (showing data of interest like debt, spending, jobless rate, etc.). But the bulk of data analysis would be left to third parties: analysts, journalists, citizens (and also aliens like me). Easily available data would make for more insightful reporting, more informed decisions, and endless business opportunities.

I don’t know that we need another bureaucracy to do this, but the underlying goal is the right one.