Transparency, participation, and collaboration are the three principles driving the Obama administration’s effort to open up federal information to the public, the White House’s deputy chief technology officer, Beth Noveck, has said.

Speaking at a forum at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, on 24 September, she said that an integral part of that effort is the new website www.data.gov, a portal for “the massive release of data in open, downloadable, machine readable format across all agencies.” She called it “a commitment to open data and …