GSA unveils Data Federation portal

A day after the White House convened an Open Data Innovation Summit to discuss its work to structure and share government data, the GSA unveiled a new effort to highlight emerging data standards and API initiatives across federal, state and local government.

The Open Data Summit on Sept. 28, co-hosted by White House, the Small Business Administration, the General Services Administration and the industry-backed Data Foundation, showcased cutting-edge uses of open data driving government efficiency, innovation and economic opportunity for the public.

In conjunction with the event, the GSA on Sept. 29 launched the U.S. Data Federation portal, calling it a new effort to support government-wide data standardization and data federation initiatives across federal agencies and local governments.

The effort, according to GSA, builds on data.gov, and is a "coordinating mechanism" for profiles and case studies of agencies' use of unified and sound data architectures used across government agencies. Some examples of projects worth profiling include the Department of Transportation's DOT's National Transit Map, the Project Open Data metadata schema, Contact USA and the Police Data Initiative.

The Data Federation effort will also run initiatives to let the public to create applications that incorporate data from multiple government agencies.

As part of the federation, GSA will also pilot development of reusable components needed for a successful data federation strategy including schema documentation tools, schema validation tools, and automated data aggregation and normalization capabilities.

The initial work of the federation, according to the website is curation of federal open data efforts.