president obama let us use your webpages
The US government creates and maintains vast storehouses of information. Most of these are publicly available online. Among the more useful:
Images can come from anywhere, but text cannot. Thus the tiger mapping service has a REST API that can be used by/from any webpage. Any webpage can use image data from anywhere, like this pic:
from the US navy
While an API for every bit of government data would be nice, i live in the real world. There is an ongoing economic crises, war, etc.
Almost as good as an API would be simple allowable access from other pages. The information is supposed to be free. Without spending a dime, a server can be configuered to allow other webpages to fetch data from it, without a thrid party server. This allows more flexible use, greater creativivty, and removes cost barriers to upcoming programmers.
A web page can be saved onto the desktop, thus not needing a server to view the webpage. Once viewed, that saved page can fetch data directly from government webpages that have made a configuration change or two. It’s not a security problem; this information is already accessible to any browser, server, or regular desktop application.
The simple change would mean that all this useful data would be available to mere web pages. A 14 year old can write an application that 100 million people could use tomorrow; without cost to the programmer. Think of it as a small business incentive to individuals who are willing to work for the common good.
There are a couple way to open the tap:
If the government were to pick one, it would be the standard overnight. The Obama administration revamped the white house’s robots.txt file on day one. Perhaps they will be open to allowing small fries access to the data to create new combinations, visualizations, and services we cannot yet imagine. let’s not have any barriers that a 1kb text file cannot overcome!
