A decade ago, President Barack Obama first stepped into the Oval office and mandated the Open Government Initiative with a memorandum calling for transparency, participation, and collaboration of information from the Federal Government to the public. Now if it’s hard to wrap your mind around the concept of government and transparency altogether, let alone the other two principles, you’re not alone. This is where Open Data , a school of thought that some information ought to be available to the public without cost or copyright restrictions, comes into discussion in the United States. Although not the first push for public access to information in the U.S., (see: Freedom of Information Act of 1966 , Privacy Act Amendments of 1974 , Open Government Act of 2007 ), the scale of data collected and made available online over the past decade is unprecedented. So What Data Do They Have? The datasets represent information managed from various departments across Federal agencies and also pulls...