Moving from Open Data to Open Knowledge: Announcing the Commerce Data Usability Project

" ... The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), for instance, is an example of a Federal agency leading the charge on using open data to create real-world value. In just the past year, for instance, DOC established the Commerce Data Advisory Council, a group of up to 20 expert members helping to optimize the beneficial use of the full range of data that the DOC distributes, and the Commerce Data Service, a within-government start-up team forming partnerships with the twelve bureaus that make up the DOC to deliver products and services to help government agencies. And in 2016, the DOC is committed to building on this momentum with new and expanded efforts to transform open data into knowledge into action ... Unfortunately, far too many DOC datasets are either hard to find, difficult to use, and/or not yet publicly available on Data.gov, the home of U.S. government’s open data. This challenge is not exclusive to DOC; and indeed, under Project Open Data, Federal agencies are working hard on various efforts to make tax-payer funded data more easily discoverable ... One of these efforts is DOC’s Commerce Data Usability Project (CDUP). To unlock the power of data, just making data open isn’t enough. It’s critical to make data easier to find and use—to provide information and tools that make data accessible and actionable for all users. That’s why DOC formed a public-private partnership to create CDUP, a collection of online data tutorials that provide students, developers, and entrepreneurs with the necessary context and code for them to start quickly extracting value from various datasets. Tutorials exist on topics such as ..."