The Data Chop

A casualty of the effort to reduce spending by the US federal government may be Data.gov, reports MIT's Technology Review. The budget for the Electronic Government Fund is being cut from $35 million to $8 million, creating fears that some programs will not be funded. Harlan Yu, a graduate student at Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University tells Tech Review that Data.gov introduced a standardized data format for that makes it easier for the data to be processed by third parties. Joseph Kelly, chief operating officer of Infochimps, adds that the real problem would be if that data is lost or no longer accessible. "The website is really great, but the crucial thing is the actual data," he says.