New apps for US Government data
Sunlight Labs – “a non-profit, non partisan Washington, DC based organization focused on digitization of government data” has been running a contest to identify the top three websites offering applications that provide “easy access and understanding for the public” to US government data/information. They all make it just a bit easier to access high quality data online.
The winners are:
First Prize: DataMasher. This website allows you to select from a wide variety of data sets (mostly from Data.gov) and to then combine them into a personalized “mashup.” Mashups take the form of tables and maps. Examples of recent mashups are Health Care Coverage + Premiums; Unemployment + State Land Area; and Median Household Income + Median Monthly Mortgage Costs.
Second Prize: GovPulse. As mentioned in another blog entry below…this site provides a single search interface for all issues of the US Federal Register, from 1994 to present.
Third Prize: ThisWeKnow: This site provides access to “nationwide data sets from six different agencies in the data.gov catalog.” In practice, users browse or search for specific American communities and then view a list of fast facts about those communities. ThisWeKnow then provides links to the underlying data for each fast fact.