Outsell’s David Curle, Director & Lead Analyst wrote in a recent Outsell Insight: “The White House, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) have announced that they have begun publishing the Federal Register in XML, available at data.gov, the executive branch’s open data depository.
The Federal Register was a model of open government when it began publication almost 75 years ago. This daily publication aggregates information about executive branch activities, including policy changes and proposed and final new rules from hundreds of federal agencies – over 150 separate policy moves per day. Legislation and court decisions may be where the law gets made and interpreted, but the pages of the Federal Register document the actual detailed impacts that government regulatory bodies have on citizens and corporations. It is searchable and available through dozens of commercial and non-commercial databases and websites, and its text is republished and analyzed on a daily basis by any number of publishers that closely watch regulatory affairs, but this new move makes the entire text of the Federal Register available for free, in bulk form, XML-tagged, for anyone who wants to take it and run with it.
BIIA Comment: Let us hope that other nations follow suit and let free enterprise add value to it
