Next.Data.Gov is a Slick Replacement for the Federal Records Site

The White House just gave a sneak peek at a "very early beta" version of Data.gov, which bureaucrats at the Office of Science and Technology Policy are calling "Next.Data.gov." And it looks like a polished, modern website - not bad for government work.

Data.gov, for those of you who have never used it, is a place to get datasets that are held and generated by the Federal Government. Data from federally funded studies, statistics, and information about the Federal government are part of Data.gov. The site exists as part of President Obama's "Open Government" initiative, whose goal is to improve access to Federal data and encourage anyone in the public to conduct analysis, develop applications, and perform research on the data. (And no, the data collected by the NSA are not part of Data.gov's offerings).

"At Data.gov, you can search through and download more than 75,000 data sets - data on everything from what different hospitals charge for different procedures, to credit card complaints, to weather and climate measurements," said President Obama last Monday at a presentation in the White House. "And what's happening is entrepreneurs and business owners are now using that data -- the people's data --to create jobs and solve problems that government can't solve by itself or can't do as efficiently."

Next.Data.gov is meant to provide a modern way to search and browse data, and judging by the screenshots that the White House's website has provided so far, the new site looks more modern, user friendly, and clutter-free than any other government website ever has (case in point, have you ever tried searching and navigating through the U.S. Patent office's website?).

The Data.gov workers at the General Services Administration, along with some Presidential Innovation Fellows and people over at the Office of Science and Technology Policy studied how the public was using the first Data.gov site. They found that visitors were looking for examples of how to use the datasets on offer for free by the Federal Government. They also saw that sources such as journalists were publishing articles and tweets using federal datasets, so they have included a live stream with individual cards for posts (which makes it look a lot like Google+) to show off how some of the data are being used.

The team also enabled a more powerful search engine, powered by Solr, which they promise will be more intuitive and easier to find relevant data. The search engine will include autocomplete search suggestions and auto-indexing of datasets from Federal agencies that publically publish their catalogues to make them searchable, starting with datasets from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Along with the info card stream, Next.Data.Gov will include software to build data visualizations for the site, and a community section based on WordPress to encourage citizen interaction. And they're experimenting with friendlier fonts, starting with "Abel," a modern interpretation of a flat-sided sans serif for headings and "Lato," a semi-rounded sans serif font for body text.

Finally, the new Data.Gov site will be smartphone and tablet-ready, automatically adapting to the screen size of your gadgets, bringing it officially into the new decade.