The Obama Administration's Open Government Directive was unveiled today. Concerning open formats the key provisions are:

“each agency shall take prompt steps to expand access to information by making it available online in open formats...…..To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information........”

Just give us the data! That's been the mantra of open-government enthusiasts, developers among them, who have created mashups – web-based tools that make the reams of government data more accessible and, importantly, put this data to effective public use. For example, Stumble Safely, highlighted in a recent New York Times article, links data regarding incidents of crime with popular locations, such as bars, restaurants and transportation hubs to help guide people home safely after a night out.

However, these mashups are typically web-based and do not provide access to the “data” inside a stand-alone ODF document/file. Like it or not, government bureaucracies are still very document-centric and there is a lot of government “data” stored in documents, the challenge being how to provide easy access to this data.

I was pleased to learn that the White House is planning to make increasing use of RDFa, a way of tagging metadata to content that could make this hard-to-find data more searchable. An RDF-based framework will be deployed in ODF v 1.2, which is currently available for public review. New techniques were also discussed and developed to provide access to data inside ODF documents/files at the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOo Con 2009).

With today's announcement, the Obama Administration has taken an important step on open government data and acknowledged the role open formats play in this regard. For document-centric governments, an open document format remains essential to delivering on this promise.