According to ReadWriteWeb, funding for Data.gov will be drastically cut in 2011. Early on, Data.gov appeared to have a lot of potential, but it hasn’t lived up to it fully; many important U.S. government datasets are missing, and much of what there is harder to navigate than really necessary. Also, it doesn’t offer much in the way of tools for common data-oriented tasks: converting between formats, summarizing, modeling and charting. I don’t deny that there is no entity more familiar with the government’s data holdings than the government, but the private sector could do a better job than what Data.gov has managed so far.
Fate of Data.gov Revealed; US Gov Almost Completely Drops the Ball
