Summary

Making government information available online would not only benefit individual users of government websites, it would also make it simpler for third parties to aggregate government data. By aggregating data, websites can present government information in innovative and useful ways. For example, federal spending data gathered from a government website could be presented by a third party as an interactive map that shows the locations of funding recipients. Such applications make data exponentially more valuable. Government need not develop such innovative tools itself; as long as the data is made available online in a structured format, private parties will make good use of it.