Data.gov is online and pumping out publicly viewable data for the world to play with. Getting it up and running was no small task, due to the inherent nature of people to want to closely hold onto the data, or pre-process it into some type of barchart or piechart.  Data.gov is all about pure unprocessed data.  Government Computer News talks about some of the hurdles they’ve had to overcome.

“Once you start applying visualizations to data, you start applying context to it as well, and we don’t think this is the government’s job,” Johnson said. “Visualizations are inherently editorial, and I’m not sure that’s government’s responsibility. I’m not saying don’t do visualization, but don’t do data visualization first. Work on the quality of the data first.”

Ready for reuse? — Government Computer News.