
I was excited for our assignment on government data because my Techcrumbs final looks to use large datasets to really mature. I first looked through the cavernous datasets of data.gov primarily in the world of commerce/exports. It was an ordeal, not because the government has done a bad job in serving this data up using a unified UI with loads of features, but because of the lack of urgency govt agencies have organized their data. It puts a developer at a disadvantage because at any point, when the government wakes up and realizes this is the future of everything and mandates the upkeep of better datasets, scores of web apps, and applications will be broken. If you have time though, you can see an unreal amount of amazingly relevant data. This data access evolution is a shockingly important point in our democracy.
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