Congress and the new administration should adopt policies that will promote "a dynamic force of third-party Internet sites and tools to enhance the usefulness of government data," the Association for Computing Machinery's public policy committee recommended Thursday. The group's statement came on the heels of President Barack Obama's "day one" memos urging government transparency and citizen participation and an announcement that the public will be able to track economic stimulus package funding at Recovery.gov after the bill wins congressional approval.

"Internet users are combining and analyzing information in innovative ways that go beyond what the data's original publishers imagined," ACM Vice Chair Edward Felten said in a press release. "Government has a treasure trove of data and it can unleash creative new analysis by giving users access to this data in a format that allows them the advantage of easy, fast integration, machine-readability, download capability, and authenticity measures." Felten is a professor at Princeton University and an oft quoted cyber expert.

ACM's recommendations for data that is already considered public include...

• Data published by the government should be in formats and approaches that promote analysis and reuse of that data.
• Data republished by the government that has been received or stored in a machine-readable format (such as online regulatory filings) should preserve the machine-readability of that data.
• Information should be posted so as to also be accessible to citizens with limitations and disabilities.
• Citizens should be able to download complete datasets of regulatory, legislative or other information, or appropriately chosen subsets of that information, when it is published by government.
• Citizens should be able to directly access government-published datasets using standard methods such as queries via an API (Application Programming Interface).
• Government bodies publishing data online should always seek to publish using data formats that do not include executable content.
• Published content should be digitally signed or include attestation of publication/creation date, authenticity, and integrity.