San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is expected to announce today that his city's restaurant inspection data will begin to appear on Yelp, the business listings service. Also included in the announcement, expected at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., is that Yelp, in conjunction with city technologists in San Francisco and New York, NY, have created what they hope will become a de-facto standard for restaurant inspection data. Called Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification, or LIVES, the hope is that this specification will make restaurant inspection information easy for developers to handle and, as a result, more ubiquitous on the web. Read More

In light of the recent debate over federal funding for Data.gov and other sites, Drew Conway parses CrunchBase for the overlap between firms working in "government" and "data." He finds a drop off in ... Read More

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signs open data legislation into law. Photo: Courtesy Gavin Newsom / twitpic San Francisco, Ca., made the news last week when its board of supervisors passed an open-data law, one-upping ... Read More

A recent report to British Parliament found an increasing trend towards crowdsourced surveillance — in which monitoring of cameras in public spaces is left to the crowd crowd. Photo: Zigazou / Flickr The city of ... Read More

A story that appeared on the cover of a recent edition of the New York Times asserted that 20th-century notions of how the federal government should handle citizens' private tax information are keeping valuable ... Read More

If you were at PdF '09 in New York City, you heard the idea floated that "public means online." In other words, if the law or regulation requires some document or other resource to be "public," you ... Read More

The Washington Post's ombudsperson Andrew Alexander has an apology to make. He's super sorry that the Post doesn't do a better job exposing its readers to government data: Read More

There's not going to be much in the way of new news for our regular readers in Claire Cain Miller's big piece in the New York Times today about how governments are slowly opening up their data stores to the public and ... Read More