The federal government today launched data.gov, a clearinghouse for data generated by the federal government; OMB director Peter Orszag has more details at the White House blog. Unfortunately, and somewhat ironically, the news coverage of this event seems to have been usurped by former Obstructionist in Chief Dick Cheney. Considering the potential impact data.gov may have on Americans’ every day lives, it’s unfortunate this story is getting a short shrift over sour grapes and fear mongering.

I haven’t had much time to dig into the details, but so far it looks excellent. The data is searchable, rather rich and in a variety of parsable formats, like CSV and XML. This is going to be a boon to media organizations, watchdog/good government groups and ordinary folk interested in how the sausage gets made.

Time will tell how useful and complete the data turns out to be but the fact that data.gov even exists is a landmark achievement. Can anyone seriously imagine the Bush administration, or even his predecessor, opening up government databases like this? Even allowing for the fact that we are living in a gilded age of technology (though, I would argue that data.gov isn’t doing anything that wouldn’t have been technically possible in, say, 2000), this kind of initiative required a political will that has been missing in modern times.

Now that the data is out there, it’s our job to do something with it.