Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through - The New York Times

This abundance of data can be a gold mine for discovery and insights, but finding the nuggets can be arduous, requiring special skills. A project coming out of the M.I.T. Media Lab on Monday seeks to ease that challenge and to make the value of government data available to a wider audience. The project, called Data USA, bills itself as “the most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data.” It is free, and its software code is open source, meaning that developers can build custom applications by adding other data.