Sorting Through the Government Data Explosion - NYTimes.com

A case study in information value-add

All the data the American government is pouring onto the Web will be useful only if people can make sense of it. What’s needed are tools for sorting, combining and presenting raw data sets in visual form. That’s the challenge being tackled by Mr. Hendler and his team.

“There’s an unfathomable about of data out there,” Mr. Hendler said in an interview on Friday afternoon. “We’re trying to help people use it and understand it.”

Mr. Hendler, joined by two faculty colleagues, Deborah McGuinness and Peter Fox, and a handful of undergraduate and graduate students, have made more than 50 demonstration data projects in recent months. The data demos, tools and tutorials are on R.P.I.’s Data-Gov Web site.

Sorting Through the Government Data Explosion - NYTimes.com